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Tyler Nickel FourKites headshotTyler NickelSenior Product Marketing Manager, FourKites

With lean supply chain practices coming into the forefront of business strategy, leave no stone unturned. Find out how the yard is low-hanging fruit in battling cost & service pressure.

Is disruption here to stay? As 2022 brings new challenges to supply chains across the globe, including the War in Ukraine, lockdowns in China, rising fuel costs and general inflation, weathering the storm isn’t a viable option for shippers anymore.

Yet, in the face of these challenges, the demands for cost control and service have only grown louder. As you shuffle your carriers, engage in complex network analytics and make major decisions, be sure to not miss one of the easiest wins you can walk away with in 2022 by eliminating tens of thousands of dollars of excess monthly costs.

Stemming the Tide with Technology

Gaining valuable insight into business processes has helped shippers from every industry quickly stomp out cost fires and enhance service. The final frontier of that revolution is happening in the yard, where visibility and intelligence are becoming difference makers in the battle against cost and service pressure.

“The yard has always been a complex system in itself,” explains Chris Brumett, vice president of Facilities and IoT, “For a long time, the goal was simply to get trailers loaded or unloaded as quickly as possible. Efforts to provide some semblance of a process or to track yard operations have actually contributed to cost pressures and service challenges. Companies need a solution that helps identify those unique chokepoints while providing an application to empower crews to do something about it.” 

Shedding Light on Excess Cost – Then Eliminating It

It’s one thing to be able to track and identify issues with operations, it’s another thing to use that same technology to immediately put a solution in the hands of daily operators. Where cost used to be measured as a trailing indicator of efficiency, crews are immediately alerted to the optimal next task to keep your cost down and budget intact.

“Take carrier detention as an example,” reflects Raj Patel, FourKites’ industry vice president for 3PLs and Logistics Service Providers. “For most businesses, detention costs are proverbial taxes they pay for holding onto capacity longer than they agreed to. When the facility runs inefficiently, carrier wait times can more than double from agreed-to terms, resulting in thousands of dollars in daily fees and a reputation for being a productivity drain for carriers. A real-time visibility solution can stop that immediately.”

A Springboard for Service

The expectation for faster speed-to-market is often hindered by equipment and inventory constraints. The issue is the facility – and the yard – acts as a bottleneck and can quickly dampen any speed or efficiency gains achieved upstream. Without a way to track the chaos in the yard, there’s simply nothing you can do to proactively control it.

“We’ve seen companies who are strangling themselves in the yard,” recalls Courtland Halbrook, Facilities General Manager. “When a production line needs a part or an outbound order is cut with a specific item, a WMS system might recognize it as delivered even if it’s still sitting in the yard. The bullwhip effect of the yard ‘easter egg hunt’ can be devastating. Dynamic Yard makes the location of inventory outside of your four walls available in the palm of your hand, keeping your teams in fluid motion.” 

The Time to Level Up Your Yard is Now

The world of supply chain technology is accelerating. From end-to-end visibility to in-warehouse automation and robotics, your business is harnessing more technology in its supply chain execution than ever before. But if you leave yard management to homegrown or TMS-provided systems, your supply chain tech stack might fail you in the yard.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be launching our “Level Up Your Yard” campaign, featuring a webinar and a series of videos detailing how to put control back into your hands in 2022. The closer you look to your direct operations, the more control you have over cost and service. The yard presents a major opportunity to rein in inefficiency that hides itself in complexity, generating significant cost savings and improved end-to-end service.


Be sure to register for our Webinar to find out how businesses are taking advantage of leading YMS solutions to give their business control and generate a full ROI in as little as 3 months.

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