That eerie feeling when you can’t locate a critical trailer in your yard? Or the spine-chilling moment when you realize inventory has vanished into thin air? Your yard might be haunted by inefficiencies that are costing you millions in lost inventory, fees, and wasted productivity.
Once inventory enters your supply chain, it becomes increasingly difficult to track and manage accurately. Too often, the yard becomes a black hole where visibility disappears and chaos creeps in — when you need to access a specific item in the yard or on an inbound trailer, it can be nearly impossible to quickly have teams prioritize what needs to be managed.
Worst still, teams get trapped in a nightmare of manual processes, desperately trying to track assets in the yard and the POs and SKUs inside them with outdated tools. Some still rely on clipboards and spreadsheets, leaving them powerless against the ghostly inefficiencies that drain resources, kill productivity, and impact customer order fulfillment.
The results can be killer: stockouts at stores, missed delivery windows, and wasted time.
But companies are fighting back against these inventory apparitions by integrating their YMS and site schedules with a system that tracks potential stockouts and automatically prioritizes hot loads, putting teams back in control over inventory.
For example, one major beverage company has transformed its yard operations at a key distribution hub. Instead of letting good processes get possessed by bad technology, they built on their existing strengths.
The result? No more endless email chains about asset dwell times. No more radio-dispatch haunting the yard team’s every move. By automating routine tasks, they freed their people to focus on strategy instead of chasing phantom trailers.
Plus, better inventory control means no more lost sales, higher on-shelf availability, fewer expedites, and happier customers. Full automation takes the analysis and guesswork out of decision-making, ensuring an insight is immediately acted upon as soon as it’s identified.
The solution to these yard management horrors isn’t mystical – it’s methodical. Modern yard management systems can:
When you combine better yard visibility with smarter inventory management, the benefits materialize quickly: higher on-shelf availability, fewer rush shipments, and happier customers.
Due to the seasonality of our business, the yard gets really, really congested. For all the major holidays, we’re bringing in inventory and then inventory is quickly going out. In years past, we were operating exclusively off of Excel worksheets… sometimes even on a paper on a clipboard. Now, with FourKites Dynamic Yard, we have that next-level visibility, that next-level functionality within the supply chain to be able to say, ‘Hey, this trailer is here now. It’s got this product on it. It’s a priority and needs to be unloaded right away.”
Your yard doesn’t have to be a source of supply chain nightmares. The right combination of process improvement and technology can banish inefficiencies and bring order to chaos.
Ready to learn more about transforming your yard operations? Download our ebook, “Using New Yard Logistics Technology to Solve Old Supply Chain Challenges,” to discover how leading companies are turning their yards from horror shows into success stories.
Don’t let another peak season become a logistics nightmare. The time to exorsize your yard’s demons is now.