Loadsmart this week launched its Yard Management System, or YMS, at Manifest in Las Vegas. The company said the new YMS is digitizing docks, yards, and gates by enabling customers to oversee truck movements, track assets, and improve coordination from one interface.
“Yard management systems bring control-tower functions to operators, deriving their value from integration with order, inventory, people, automation, and transportation management solutions,” said Paul Brisson, Loadsmart’s director of product management for dock and warehousing.
“The Opendock YMS extends our existing gate and dock management mechanisms, adding value beyond just the yard,” he continued. “Customers can easily integrate with their existing WMS, ERP, and TMS. Unlike other solutions on the market, we designed our YMS alongside our customers to be easy to set up and use on a day-to-day basis.”
Loadsmart offers YMS with Opendock, NavTrac
Loadsmart built the Yard Management System directly into Opendock, which it said more than 3,500 facilities nationwide are using. Customers can also integrate Opendock with NavTrac, Loadsmart’s asset intelligence system using computer vision, optical character recognition (OCR), and artificial intelligence.
Opendock and NavTrac now bring gate management, yard management, and dock scheduling into a single digital workflow. The Chicago-based company said this allows manual driver check-in and routine yard audits while automating visibility.
Loadsmart said its logistics offerings combine industry expertise and technology to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and digitize transportation. The company offers a mix of technologies and services for companies to do more with less. They include planning, optimization, and execution to gate, yard, and dock management, ending with audit and pay capabilities.
Yard Management System designed for flexibility
Loadsmart touted some key features of its YMS:
- Customizable yard view: This can reduce congestion and easily adapt to changes in traffic flow, storage needs, and demand fluctuations, said the company.
- Driver self-check-in: This feature is designed to minimize wait times, reduce paperwork and manual data entry, and improve accuracy.
- Drag-and-drop assignments: Visual and intuitive truck and container assignments can reduce errors and move assets faster, Loadsmart claimed.
- Two-way SMS: Short Message Service keeps drivers informed to minimize confusion, unnecessary idling, and miscommunication with yard personnel.
- Asset tracking: YMS can prevent lost or misplaced equipment and track vendor activities to improve on-time performance.
- Custom yard setup: The system can improve decision-making and bottlenecks by customizing availability and getting quick status updates on yard conditions, said Loadsmart.
“We heard from users that other YMSs are overly complex, so we built ours to be simple and easy, focusing on solving real problems,” said Julia Darold, the product lead for Opendock and YMS. “We designed it to be flexible enough to fit any facility’s workflow, so it’s easy to adopt.”
“The ability to track trailer and container movements, manage assignments with simple drag-and-drop tools, and automate driver communication means our customers can improve their operations without adding complexity,” she asserted.
Loardsmart said the YMS, in combination with its dock scheduling system, gives shippers and warehouses a way to manage dock and yard operations from a single system. Information flows from the schedule to the YMS and back.
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