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Tyler Nickel FourKites headshotTyler NickelSenior Product Marketing Manager, FourKites

An idling truck can burn up to a gallon of diesel an hour and rack up completely avoidable detention costs. Are truck queues adding to your environmental impact and eating away at your budget?

Every morning, logistics professionals worldwide wake up and helplessly watch as ETAs of critical orders slip further into the future. Adding to the pain, they notice their senior management team has scheduled a recurring meeting for them to explain why the supply chain budget was blown (again), expecting them to have all the answers to the global logistics nightmare that has unfolded. And for some reason, through all this chaos, people are talking about sustainability and the need to reduce carbon emissions – as if logistics professionals don’t already have enough on their plate.

Luckily, a major key to these challenges isn’t too far away. In fact, it’s in the yard.

While there’s no magical remedy, yard management solutions (YMS), like Dynamic Yard, help drive efficiency across multiple operations. They provide a simple solution that quickly delivers ROI and needed relief by helping reduce diesel-chugging truck idling while providing insight into driver detention patterns, labor efficiency and more to inform a strategy that tackles carbon and cost pain points.

Reducing Emissions by 20% in the Yard

22.461 pounds. That’s how much carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere per gallon of diesel burned, according to the U.S. EPA. For now, greenhouse gas emissions are a seemingly unavoidable part of the supply chain. Luckily, tools like the FourKites sustainability dashboard help monitor the pulse of your supply chain emissions. Visibility is only half the battle – setting in motion a plan to reduce emissions should be a central part of any green strategy.

As you start your journey to measure your Scope emissions, you’ll gain insight into where your major carbon-emitting sources lie throughout your network and which ones you’re able to control. As a major contributor to your Scope 3 emissions, supply chain offers multiple easy ways to effectively reduce your greenhouse gas contributions. Whether it’s converting to more sustainable modes of transportation, like intermodal, or assessing emerging technologies like electric tractors and platooning, your sustainability strategy should be holistic and leave no stone unturned. The issue is, some strategies are still extremely nascent in their development, while others may require significant cost, early adopter risk or adjustments to your supply chain model. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from your supply chain with an investment in technology that is actually designed to pay for itself.

Today’s supply chain environment is rife with disruption, often leading to plant or distribution center dock schedules that are out-of-date before they’re even published. As your facilities work to untangle the daily havoc of carrier cancellations and rescheduling, you might notice that truck queues and idle times are growing due to schedule misalignment. Carriers may be quick to tell you their detention clock starts ticking as soon as they enter your yard, but did you know your supply chain is also accruing unnecessary carbon dioxide emissions as well?

That’s where a SaaS-based solution comes in. Sustainability is born from efficiency – and with advanced software like a YMS, efficiency is guaranteed through the optimization of your schedules to dramatically reduce idle time. In the last quarter alone, clients who used Dynamic Yard emitted 20% fewer carbon emissions than non-Dynamic Yard users through the reduction in idle time.

Preparing for Regulations

While most of the green revolution sweeping supply chain has been driven by consumers demanding sustainable practices from the companies they purchase from and shareholders requiring it, don’t be surprised if government regulation catches up. The recently proposed regulatory mandate, rule 2305 in Southern California, focuses on driving down emissions associated with warehousing activity – including a provision of reducing dwell time on-site. Other recent legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act, advances pressure on companies to reduce “diesel emissions from goods movement facilities”.

These regulations will require a mix of strategy and investment to achieve. While part of the equation is assessing and adopting the use of alternative energy, the immediate reduction of carbon dioxide emissions can be achieved with better management of capacity on-site, buying you time to develop a longer-term strategy.

Sustainability is Good Business

While significantly reducing emissions  from your yard is a huge win, there are still other areas to improve. For starters, Dynamic Yard not only improves carrier efficiency in your lot, it also improves overall dock worker productivity. Much like reducing idle tractors around your yard, prescriptive task assignments directly from the application ensures dock workers already have the next available task in-hand, with the ability to view each individual workers’ efficiency around the yard to guide continuous improvement on the individual level.

Tom France, Vice President of Distribution, Logistics and Transportation at Trane Technologies presented at our Visibility conference and outlined how quickly their facilities were able to rein in carrier cost. In fact, in just the first three months of using Dynamic Yard, Trane achieved full ROI by reducing carrier detention throughout their facilities. Not included in the ROI calculation is the cost defrayment of better inventory control, improved service levels and more.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about the cost benefits of Dynamic Yard and how it unlocks the potential for 3X ROI, download our Executive Guide.

We’ll Take it From Here

Implementing new systems is never an easy task. In fact, one could assume that in today’s supply chain climate, going through an implementation for a software that manages a critical part of your supply chain may seem like a risk. Luckily, our implementation process is proven, led by our in-house experts and trusted by some of the industry’s most complex solutions – FourKites provides a change management approach bolstered by a safety net of proven processes that have been perfected by supply chain professionals who focus solely on implementation.

If you’re curious about how Dynamic Yard can help improve supply chain sustainability and provide budget relief to your organization, we’re ready to help. Our consultative approach includes a full, personalized assessment of your current operations, cost and savings estimates, a plan to operationalize and more – all designed to get you up and running within approximately 8 weeks.

Contact us here to learn more.

1 https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php

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