If you don’t live in the world of logistics, you might think “yard operations” is what you do with your riding mower on Saturday. But if you do, you realize its critical importance within overall supply chain management.
Yard automation leverages technology designed to improve efficiency, reduce operating costs and increase accuracy. Legacy yard management systems (YMS) have done an admirable job of working toward these goals, and newer developments like RFID and GPS have advanced the capabilities of yard operations.
More recently, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with YMS has pushed the envelope in terms of what’s possible. By capturing and analyzing real-time data on yard assets, it enhances overall visibility and improves tracking, auditing, and dock scheduling. This, in turn, helps drive measurable cost reductions and productivity gains.
Challenges Leading to the Need for Yard Automation
Many yards still rely on manual systems for yard and gate operations. Incredibly, this still includes using clipboards to log vehicles in and out. The result is often errors, delays, and bottlenecks, which impact production and customer schedules.
Without accurate real-time tracking of all assets, yard managers find it hard to know exactly where everything is located at any given time. Yard personnel have to track them down, causing inefficiencies and more delays.
Poor coordination between yard and warehouse teams can cause trailers and containers to sit idle for extended periods. This can increase costs, as the company can be liable for carrier detention charges. It also means missed delivery windows and demurrage charges for keeping containers past the contract period.
In addition to being highly inefficient, manual gate access control, trailer inspections, and other security tasks can expose a company to compliance risks and security vulnerabilities.
Key Features to Look For in Yard Automation
To be truly effective, yard automation should be handled holistically by coordinating all aspects of gate, yard, and dock operations. From vehicle access control (VAC) to inventory management, yard audits, and dock scheduling, real-time data sharing between systems is key to synchronization and maximum efficiency.
Automated VAC speeds up the gate process by eliminating manual checks of vehicle, trailer, and driver credentials and identifying characteristics. This reduces dwell time and carbon emissions. While this can be done using RFID sensors and tags, it’s less than optimal for 3P carriers, requiring continual tagging and untagging.
An AI-based yard vision system that captures and analyzes real-time data from security cameras removes this obstacle, enabling an efficient, highly secure gate process. Incoming drivers pre-register on an app and send the system a check-in request, generating a QR code they scan at the gate.
A yard management system (YMS) can utilize various technologies to collect data that helps it locate and track assets moving into, through, and out of the yard. These include vision systems and RFID, as well as GPS, barcode scanning, and manual data entry on handheld devices.
While all viable ways of feeding data into the system exist, manual processes (barcode, data entry) are cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to human error. RFID and GPS both enable yard automation but are limited in terms of being hardware-based, requiring transmitters and sensors. RFID, in particular, is challenged due to distance limitations with passive tags or the high cost of active tags. A vision system integrated with a YMS, however, has no such drawbacks, making it a more efficient, lower-cost option.
Applying yard automation to dock scheduling has several advantages as well. It makes trailer assignments more efficient, reducing driver wait times. This improves throughput and helps maintain inventory levels and delivery schedules. RFID has drawbacks for the reasons previously stated. While GPS can handle functions like dynamic scheduling, automated assignments, and dock utilization optimization, its location logic is based only on geographic coordinates. A vision system, however, not only provides instant visibility of assets and docks but can recognize things like a trailer’s condition, whether doors are open, or if a dock is occupied.
Yard automation systems often come with analytics capabilities that provide insights into key metrics such as truck dwell time, gate throughput, and equipment utilization. This helps to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. They can also automate task assignments to yard workers or drivers based on live conditions, optimizing labor utilization and reducing idle time.
Other Benefits of AI-Based Yard Automation
A major issue in logistics is claims management on missed or late deliveries, physical damages, proof of shipment, and detention and demurrage. With always-on surveillance of assets, a YMS integrated with an AI-based vision system captures real-time data on vehicle condition, cargo status, etc. Both shippers and carriers can provide images or videos to support a claim challenge. This alone can save thousands of dollars in annual charges.
Given the unreliability of RFID systems – where a trailer can show up as several spaces away from its actual location, or several can be “stacked” in one slot – yard managers often run regular physical audits as a backup. With an AI-based vision system, unmanned yard audits can be fully automated.
Yard mapping with an AI-based yard vision system can be done much faster than with either RFID or GPS, both of which require asset tagging. This also makes it much more scalable and easier to update based on physical changes to yard characteristics.
Unlock the Future of Yard Operations
Yard automation helps turn logistics bottlenecks into a more streamlined, cost-effective process. AI-based vision systems offer significant advantages over RFID and GPS, as they are free of hardware constraints. With faster yard mapping, automated audits, and detailed analytics, they help maximize efficiency and resource utilization.
EAIGLE, a leading developer of yard operations technology, has developed a cutting-edge vision-based system that optimizes processes from the dock to the gate and back again. EAIGLE leverages the power of AI combined with video capture through security cameras to automate several aspects of yard operations.
EAIGLE’S AVAC™ (Automated Vehicle Access Control) captures dozens of identifying characteristics of arriving and departing vehicles for a faster, more efficient gate process. Leveraging the same technology, EAIGLE’S YardSight™ solution keeps accurate track of all assets and dock availability, so drivers and yard jockeys can quickly navigate to their designated location.
To find out how EAIGLE can revolutionize your yard operations with its cutting-edge automation and innovative approach, request a demo today.