In this episode, I was joined by Colin Mansfield who is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Yard Management Solutions. Yard Management Solution just recently won the Innovation Award at MODEX 2020 for its Yard Management Software. We discuss how their YMS helps to increase visibility in your operation and save you time and money.

Key Takeaways

• Yard Management Solutions is a software company that provides a software platform for, you guessed it, yard management. The founders wanted to start a logistics company and when they were looking for a yard management software to use they could not find one so they built one which the company is now based around. Having a yard management platform is vital when it comes to an operation with high truck volume. It can help you to prioritize the proper loads and also make sure there is nothing lost in the shuffle.
• Their software is cloud-based and updated in real-time giving you full visibility to your yard in a Google Maps like view. Additionally, their platform has multiple different options that cater to each worker involved in the yard management process. They offer modules for those working at the docks and modules for those working in the yard as well. You can also do a multi-view for operations that have multiple yards, giving management a view of everything happening at their facilities.
• Colin discusses how innovation works at Yard Management Solutions. They have won the innovation award at MODEX in 2018, been a finalist for the innovation award at ProMat in 2019 and won this year at MODEX as well. As Colin mentions, innovation happens by listening to its customers and solving their problems. The example he gives is where a customer was spending up to 3 hours a shift looking into trailers to determine what product is on the trailers, truly a pain, and a huge cost. YMS was able to develop the option to input the trailer contents through integration with their WMS at the time of yard entry. This allowed them to pull those employees out of the yard and allocate the resource to something more productive.
• The real selling point for Yard Management Solutions is visibility and time savings. What their software is able to do for your operation is to give you visibility into what is happening with your trailers and give you the proper data to make the right moves. Without a YMS the majority of operations are trying to track what is happening in their yard through whiteboards, spreadsheets, and paper logs. With YMS you can easily pull the information you need because it is recorded in the system at the time of entry so the system will tell you when you are running behind or when you are about to start incurring detention charges. The reduction in time needed to manage your yard is huge because the system is doing all of the trackings and alerting you to when action is needed. Implementing the system allows you to utilize your resources in a much more efficient way.

Check out some screenshots of what the platform looks like below and listen to the episode. Let us know how this could help improve your operation in the comments.