Do the hostler

Imagine having a guy on staff who has an iron-clad grip on the comings and goings of every vehicle in your yard. He’s a hostler-supreme, able to say exactly which trailer needs to be shunted and when, who owns it, who brought it in, and what’s on it. When there’s a problem, he tells you, your dispatchers, and the yard jockeys without hesitation. As if that weren’t enough, he works 24 hours and day and never breaks for lunch, coffee, or a trip to the washroom.

Too good to be true? Hardly, although I’m talking about technology, not a person.
The move from the gate to the dock has been called the most expensive mile in transportation, rife with bottlenecks, demurrage charges, and miscommunication. “You might be surprised that large, sophisticated companies use legal pads, grease boards, card racks, and Lotus or Excel spreadsheets to manage hundreds of inbound and outbound trailers,” says Jim Harris, president of Cypress Inland, developer of YardView yard-management systems. He says the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the people moving trailers around the yard typically work for the owner of the goods in the warehouse but get their work orders from outside vendors like a 3PL warehouse operator or trucking company.

Most yard-management systems on the market employ several technologies to reduce the chaos and confusion. Each truck or trailer is equipped with an RFID (radio frequency identification) tag, a little chip containing information that identifies the unit. RFID readers (which reliably see through snow, fog, ice, crusted dirt, even paint) pick up this data as the vehicle enters the yard.

A hostler then enters or scans other information–a container’s contents, seal number, whether it’s full or empty–into a handheld computer. Then, the system directs the truck either to a receiving or shipping door or to a staging area.

If it’s placed in a staging area, the trailer’s location is entered–again via an RF terminal–into the yard-management system’s database. If an empty trailer is required for loading or a full one is needed for unloading, the supervisor in that area notifies the dispatcher. The dispatcher then checks his PC to see what’s available and assigns one for movement to either an inbound or outbound dock door.

The selection is released into a queue of movement tasks, based on priority, and communicated to the yard staff via RF. Once a trailer is loaded, its tag is scanned on the way out of the yard, closing the information loop.

If this stuff is so great, why isn’t it more popular? Gordon Travers, the Canadian rep for Synergistic Systems, which markets Synergy Yard Management, acknowledges that YMS–yard-management systems–are expensive. One of his recent customers spent $150,000 on one. Most shippers and truck operators don’t want to tie up capital in IT when it could be used for trucks and trailers, Travers says.

Travers and Harris agree that as hefty as the pricetag sounds, YMS ROI is fast, although it can be hard to quantify because it prevents costly problems instead of generating revenue. Such as? Harris cites stories of “lost” loads of Christmas trees “found” two days before the holiday where retail values were chopped in half. Or having to rent a trailer because you didn’t know you had empties on site that haven’t moved in weeks. Or having a customer miss the in-store deadline for his ad campaign because his load of retail goods wasn’t designated as “hot” and therefore received low priority status.

And now with security becoming an issue related to speedy border clearance, the need to keep much closer tabs on your loads and equipment is in some circles becoming critical.

YMS can help you do it.

Either that or you can place a want-ad for an all-knowing, all-seeing, always-working keeper of your gates.