The State of Yard Management:
2021 Industry Report

Introduction

In a recent survey of more than 375 supply chain professionals at Fortune 500 companies, FourKites found that 92% of respondents believe a yard management system (YMS) and an automated appointment management system could add value to their organization. However, only 25% of respondents are currently using a YMS, and less than half are using an automated appointment management solution.

Why the gap? What do the 25% YMS users know that others don’t?

Compared to transportation management systems (TMSs) and WMSs — both of which are now ubiquitous across the supply chain industry — there’s a general lack of knowledge regarding the benefits of a YMS. And while visibility into in-transit freight tracking has improved considerably in recent years as companies understand the critical importance of knowing where their freight is at any given time, the yard remains a black hole in many supply chains.

But companies are now realizing that they need better last-mile visibility into inbound loads to manage the flow of traffic for manufacturing and distribution sites. Disruptions such as COVID-19 have exacerbated the challenges of managing congested yards, highlighting notorious inefficiencies of manual operations.

In this report, we will take a close look at yard management and appointment management solution adoption across industries. While some organizations are ahead of the curve, the vast majority of companies are still not using these solutions. We’ll also illustrate the value of these solutions and provide you with comprehensive information that will help you make the right decisions when it comes to optimizing yard operations for your business.

What Are Your Biggest Pain Points In The Yard?

Survey Findings

• 46% of respondents said manual processes were their biggest pain point
• 21% listed locating equipment as their biggest pain point
• Overall operational costs were a significant factor for 15% of respondents

Analysis

Across all industries, manual processes and locating equipment in the yard were the top two pain points, followed by overtime costs. Higher labor costs were a bigger concern for respondents from the Manufacturing industry, likely because those yards are among the most complex and tend to involve more manual processes. Retail yards also tend to suffer from higher costs due to the volume of shipments handled manually.

All of these problems are symptoms of the same issue: a lack of real-time visibility. Yard management systems, especially next generation-YMSs that incorporate in-yard with in-transit visibility, address all of these issues with significant ROI and operational impact.

How Big Is Your Yard?

Yard size and load volumes are just a couple factors that can dictate decisions regarding software adoption. Organizations that use a TMS and/or WMS can benefit from the addition of a YMS to provide greater visibility, which enables gate, appointment, dock and spotter optimization. In a large yard, or in a very active yard, the time spent manually spotting trailers for loading or for inventory management translates into significant labor costs, which can be greatly reduced with improved visibility.

To understand the potential for process improvements through automation, we asked respondents how many spotters, how many dock doors and how many parking spaces they have in their average facility.

Analysis

Yard sizes vary by industry and within industries, leading to a wide range of spotter use, dock doors and parking spaces. These factors play a role in the pain points experienced at any given facility, where consequences of limited space, manual operations, overtime costs and schedule rank high on the list of challenges.

Many companies focus on lowering transportation costs through a TMS or a WMS and don’t understand the potential for savings and efficiency improvements with better yard management, such as higher asset velocity and reduced detention fees. For yards of all sizes, yard operations are more than a cost center; they can be a strategic advantage, especially when integrated with the end-to-end digital supply chain.

Yard Operations Overview

In this section, we will focus on the primary functions of a yard and examine performance gaps where a YMS can streamline operations and add significant value to your business.

What Is a Spotter?

Spotters, also known as yard jockeys or hostlers, locate and move trailers between docks and parking spaces in the yard. Tasks are typically given verbally over radio and without reference to real-time yard locations. In a yard without a YMS, they are the link between the yard and the warehouse. Spotters follow extremely manual, time-intensive workflows, full of guesswork and double-checking, which can lead to costly, disruptive errors. By the time a spotter has finished a yard check, the data is often out of date.

A YMS eliminates the manual labor of tracking and locating trailers in the yard, and provides spotters with the dock door destination for each trailer.

Average Spotter Use

Survey Findings

• 78% of respondents use 1-3 spotters
• 12% of respondents employ 7 or more spotters on a regular basis
• 10% or respondents use 4-6 spotters

Analysis

Spotter use varies by yard type, size and volume. A YMS can provide insights to help determine what the spotter workload should be, how many spotters are required, and develop performance metrics to manage spotter productivity — not only at a single site but across sites.

Supply Chainiacs Talk Inventory Optimization

Inventory optimization is key to running a successful supply chain, and misplaced merchandise in the yard can be extremely costly. That’s where yard management systems come in. RFID technology allows users to identify where their merchandise is located in the yard, enabling instantaneous yard checks, avoiding misplaced shipments and keeping inventory flowing.

What Is a Gate House?

The gate house manages arrivals and departures of trailers in the yard. If the organization is using a YMS, it is the initial entry of a trailer into the system; if the organization does not use a YMS, the trailer is entered into the paper log or a homegrown system. The gate records the trailer’s arrival — either manually or using technology such as RFID tags with a YMS — and facilitates movement of the trailer to its appropriate place in the yard, be it to a dock door or to a parking space. When required, time-consuming manual trailer inspections occur at the gate during the arrival process, as guards inspect and record the results for each trailer that passes through the gates.

How Would You Describe Your Gate House Processes?

Survey Findings

• 46% of respondents who do not use a YMS or WMS report having no formal processes for managing gate-in or gate-out activity, while 12% have “unmanned” gate houses.
• 22% of respondents manage gate processes using paper documentation, reinforcing the highly manual nature of yard processes.
• Just 5% of respondents automate their gates or are using an internal system.

Analysis

The survey findings attest to a lack of digitization and optimization of gate house processes for the vast majority of respondents across all industries. The low adoption of gate management processes means that most organizations are spending far more resources than is necessary to manage loads on a first-come, first-served basis, leading to chaos in the yard — not to mention loss of visibility when it comes to carrier performance.

Appointment Management Landscape

Appointment management (AM) solutions schedule and track the time slots in which carriers drop off and pick up trailers in the yard. While standalone AM solutions do exist, the latest generation of AM solutions are designed specifically for the logistics industry, and provide a common platform for facilities, shippers and carriers to collaborate and efficiently manage appointments. These platforms, which can be seamlessly integrated with a YMS, WMS and TMS to maximize value, offer:

• Integrated appointment management, which lets carriers self-schedule appointments by viewing only the times that are available at a given facility
• Synergies with dock scheduling — tied to the type of product, as well as dock location — to ensure dock doors aren’t being double-booked
• Enhanced communication and collaboration between all stakeholders while providing a “single source of truth” for all appointment logs
• Configurable workflows to eliminate unnecessary and error-prone manual work, so you can auto-book appointments and set rules to manage by exception
• Increased real-time visibility, empowering you to reschedule appointments based on the realities on the ground

Despite these benefits, over half of survey respondents still handle AM manually via email and phone calls, or through standalone tools. These processes are not integrated with other solutions, such as a YMS, and must therefore be updated by staff manually when delays inevitably arise.

Survey Findings

• 55% of all respondents claim manual calls and emails as their biggest pain point, 21% claim poor dock door utilization, 18% claim silos between appointment management and TMS/WMS.

Analysis

Like yard management, manual processes was the leading pain point for appointment management across all industries. That points to a lack of automated processes, and the need for an endless stream of phone calls, emails and manual updates to keep up with  shifting schedules.

The other most pressing pain points — poor dock door utilization and siloed information — reflect a reliance on manual or siloed processes that don’t support easy communication among stakeholders. Adopting a dynamic appointment management tool that integrates with a yard management system and automatically updates schedules can solve for many of these problems in any industry.

Would An Appointment Management Solution Help Your Organization?

Survey Findings

• Nearly half of all respondents feel that an appointment management tool would benefit their organization
• 33% of respondents are unsure of the value of an appointment management solution

Analysis

While a significant number of respondents do recognize the value of an appointment management tool, there is still a large number who do not understand the ways such a solution could help them streamline operations.

The benefits of an appointment management solution are clear. Especially when integrated with your existing technologies, the latest generation of AM solutions facilitate collaboration among all stakeholders, enhance real-time visibility and eliminate manual, error-prone work. Looking for even more value? For organizations looking to increase the number of live loads they are able to accommodate, an integrated YMS/AM solution allows them to better coordinate and allocate resources, eliminating wasted time between loads and ultimately adding capacity.

What Are The Benefits Of A Yard Management System?

A basic YMS is a software solution designed to monitor the movement of trailers in the yard of a facility, distribution center or warehouse. Most yard management solutions offer minimal appointment, gate and inventory management functionality, while more comprehensive platforms also offer metrics, dock management and carrier tools. Today’s state-of-the-art YMS solutions can deliver in-transit visibility, as well as additional benefits like appointment management, dock scheduling and performance metrics to support continuous improvement.

The key benefits of a yard management system include:

• Visibility: Enable effective inventory management, asset utilization and performance management by knowing where every trailer is located, even across multiple yards.
• Process conformity: Establish consistent, well-documented, check-in and check-out procedures, making operations faster and easier for drivers and facility staff.
• Velocity: Streamline operations with real-time visibility into asset location and status.
• Cross-dock efficiency: Boost cross-dock volumes with a YMS and dock-door scheduling, WMS solution and workforce management.
• Spotter efficiency: Spotters receive, accept and confirm moves via mounted tablets that eliminate errors and capture data for performance analytics.
• Customer service: A single source of information eliminates the manual tracking needed to respond to customer inquiries on shipment location.
• Carrier analysis: By tracking carrier commitments, on-time performance, wait time and unload time, it’s easier to make pivotal decisions about carrier choice and how best to optimize dock labor for speedy loading and unloading.
• Carrier collaboration: Provide carriers with access to the YMS for real-time notifications.
• Cost reduction: Slash expenses across the yard by managing appointments, dwell time and labor expenses.
• Safety & security: Eliminate the need for workers to walk the yard, monitor drivers’ behavior and track moves of every trailer.
• Process improvement: Transform inefficient manual handling into optimized, data-driven processes backed by KPI setting and measurement.
• Appointment scheduling: Next-generation YMSs integrate appointment management solutions to replace time-consuming phone calls and emails.

Supply Chainiacs Talk Management ROI

The experts uncover significant sources of ROI seen from YMS implementations, such as:

• Labor cost savings throughout the yard
• Improved dock utilization and throughput
• Decreased Spoilage
• Reduced Detention

The next generation of YMS

In 2020, FourKites introduced Dynamic Yard to the market as the next generation of yard management solutions. For the first time, Dynamic Yard extends visibility beyond the chain link fence of the yard. Unlike traditional yard management solutions that show you only what’s in your yard, FourKites combines industry-leading YMS capabilities with in-transit predictive visibility and analytics so that you can proactively manage every aspect of your yard operations. With Dynamic Yard, you can track your goods from point of origin all the way to destination, and everything in between.

Now, facilities can be managed proactively and dynamically, enterprise-wide — and with a completely touch-free experience from truck arrival to departure. Mobile accessibility gives gate guards access to documents for check in/out purposes, and allows them to leave the physical vicinity of the gate house. Additionally, FourKites’ CarrierLink mobile app ensures that small carriers and owner/operators have access to the single source for load documentation.

What sets Dynamic Yard apart from other solutions?

Scalability: Dynamic Yard offers scalable enterprise solutions for any organization, regardless of size – from the smallest up to multiple enterprise locations. No matter the size and number of sites, Dynamic Yard provides comprehensive reporting and metrics to make sure every site is performing to its potential.

Process Automation: Dynamic Yard automates the most basic functions of your yard, freeing up resources to handle higher-value tasks. These range from spotter task workflow automation, to automated alerting and report emails.

Multi-tenant Visibility: Using portals designed specifically for the needs of your carriers and individual sites, Dynamic Yard empowers your stakeholders to view changes, manage appointments and complete tasks with ease.

Robust Integrations: By integrating with your TMS, WMS and in-transit load visibility, Dynamic Yard provides the full picture of your operations, and serves as your single source of truth for centralized performance analysis and monitoring.

Easy, Rapid Deployment: With a 12-week standard deployment, FourKites has mastered the balance between deployment speed, meticulousness and time to value. Our team works with you every step of the way to ensure successful deployment.

ETA-enabled Process Optimization: Visibility into every aspect of your operations enables you to streamline your supply chain. By incorporating real-time, in-transit ETAs into your yard management, you’ll be able to react quickly to unforeseen obstacles.

Yard Management Buyer’s Guide

Who needs a YMS?

Regardless of other technology platforms you use, such as warehouse and transportation management systems, Garter recommends that yard management should be strongly considered by:^*

• Organizations with any size yard
• Users with a high volume of supplier and customer shipments
• Users who suffer from yard, dock door and throughput congestion
• Users that operate a campus of yards, or who manage networks of yards to effectively deploy resources across their network

^*Gartner, Yard Management Technology Trends and Selection Considerations, Simon Tunstall & Bart De Muynck, 6 November 2020.

5 questions to guide your selection process:

Does your organization:

• Struggle to manage inventory and equipment in the yard? A solution with live yard visibility to your assets via a site-specific map provides accurate trailer inventory counts, current trailer status and efficient trailer movements.
• Pay high overtime costs due to inefficient spotter operations? Yard spotter efficiency tools minimize truck idle time and streamline yard asset movements.
• Want an effective way to communicate across the supply chain? Comprehensive communication tools align stakeholders across sites.
• Want to manage and prove continual improvement across all yards? Metrics detailing performance factors, like dwell and carrier performance, help to drive continuous improvement, and deep insights guide strategic efforts.
• Seek to improve relationships with carriers by empowering drivers? Carriers benefit from a YMS with self-service, automated appointment scheduling tools and integrated messaging, which replaces the traditional process of receiving endless check calls and replaces it with greater driver autonomy.

Conclusion

While only 25% of survey respondents have implemented yard management solutions, the overwhelming majority of organizations see the value these platforms could bring to their businesses. Despite this widespread acknowledgement of a better way of doing things, too many organizations hang on to manual practices or inadequate technology to muddle through as best they can.

Today, there’s a new and better way to move those manual processes into the digital age, transforming yard operations into a competitive advantage through increased visibility and efficiency.

Faced with ongoing supply chain volatility in consumer demand, capacity constraints, labor shortages and the ongoing pandemic, the need for enhanced visibility in the yard has never been greater. Today’s leading organizations recognize the costs of yard management blind spots and are increasingly turning to next-generation solutions that provide real-time, in-transit tracking, as well as in-yard visibility, to optimize their end-to-end operations and transform their yards into true competitive differentiators.

To learn more about next-generation yard and appointment management solutions, and the value they can bring to your organization, please contact us.