Will 2025 be the year we finally Remove Logistics Blind Spots?

Yard and facility management have historically been a significant supply chain blind spot, writes Tom Perrone (pictured below), SVP Global Professional Services at project44. Yet, the challenge of moving assets through various warehouses continues to put the delivery of goods at risk. In fact, McKinsey estimates that up to 19% of logistics costs stem from inefficient mid- and last-mile interactions, amounting to an average loss of $95 billion a year.

The reality is that when shippers have assets moving through various warehouses or distribution centres (DC), and a challenge arises, it will undoubtedly impact the final delivery of a shipment. Meanwhile, facilities or DCs often lack visibility into what goods are delivering to their warehouses and the estimated time of those deliveries. Some of these gaps are covered by a warehouse management system (WMS)… but not all.

Due to the manual or outdated processes that yards continue to operate, there is poor collaboration with drivers around delays or appointment scheduling. As a result, shippers experience increased yard overhead costs, extended trailer dwell times, and ultimately missed shipment delivery windows, all of which disrupt supply chain operations increase costs, and negatively impact customer satisfaction.

The impact of ineffective downstream supply chain operations is clear, particularly when you consider that 58% of consumers are unlikely to shop with a retailer who missed their promised delivery date. This highlights that yard management has the potential to determine whether logistics firms win repeat business and expand their customer base beyond this important Golden Quarter. So, how can logistics firms overhaul the manual appointment processes that slow down their operations and hinder customer satisfaction?

Removing logistics blind spots

Effective collaboration between facility personnel and carriers is crucial for smooth yard operations. Without appointment management capabilities in place, for example, facilities can easily become overwhelmed by a flood of phone calls and emails from carriers trying to schedule inbound or outbound pickups, as well as managing labour planning within the facility. This creates bottlenecks and inefficiencies, slowing down overall operations and disrupting productivity.

Investing in a robust yard appointment management solution is now a strategic move that can yield significant benefits, driving operational excellence and competitive advantage in the logistics industry. When crafting logistics strategies for 2025, the three most important factors to consider for optimised yard appointment management includes:

1. Overhaul manual scheduling with automated solutions
To eliminate manual scheduling, site administrators should automate the slot booking process. With advanced scheduling configurations, for example, administrators can set precise parameters for both gate and dock schedules, including custom time blocks, holiday adjustments, and day-based exceptions. Once these are in place, carriers can book slots independently through a self-service system, reducing back-and-forth communication. Additionally, administrators can pre-set automatic bookings for frequent carriers, ensuring a seamless experience for both the facility and its regular visitors.

2. Align labour planning with inbound and outbound schedules
Labour planning is essential to effective yard management, ensuring the right personnel are available at the right time to meet operational demands. When done well, labour planning boosts productivity, reduces costs, and drives overall efficiency. However, achieving this requires real-time data on trailer ETAs, warehouse performance, and inventory levels. Without these insights, warehouses will struggle to accurately track trailer arrivals and departures, leaving them in the dark about early or late arrivals and compromising scheduling accuracy.

3. Utilise real-time ETAs to streamline loading and unloading
Meeting customer demands requires warehouses to prioritise unloading the right trailers at the right time. It all starts with tracking the driver’s ETA en route to the facility. Using smart geofencing, warehouses gain precise visibility into a driver’s real-time location, providing an accurate ETA. Once a driver enters the geofenced area, the warehouse team can see their approach and adjust unloading schedules as needed, even reallocating trailers to new dock doors. This level of insight enables teams to handle unexpected delays, prioritise urgent containers, and keep operations running smoothly, without relying on carrier signals.

Digitalisation is the key to effective yard management

In the complex world of logistics and supply chain management, efficiency and precision are paramount. Fortunately, the evolution of technology continues to shape the future of yard management. This includes the integration of AI and machine learning to predict and optimise yard appointment operations, reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction. As these technologies continue to advance, so will our capabilities to transform the way yards are managed.

Given that efficient yard appointment operations directly impact delivery times and service levels, solutions to digitise and automate manual processes will play a significant role in enhancing customer satisfaction and strengthening customer relationships.

Next year, logistics companies should prioritise tech investments that enable more streamlined collaboration between facility personnel and carriers, to ensure that shipments are transferred in and out of a facility on time, and exceptions are communicated upstream to the customer. The alternative is continuing to be burdened by constant calls and emails to coordinate appointments – and, above all, face failure to better serve customers.

Manhattan Associates Named Leader in TMS

Manhattan Associates Inc., a global leader in supply chain commerce solutions, has announced it has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems for the sixth consecutive year. Manhattan Active® Transportation Management (TM) also ranks among the three highest ranked vendors in the Level 3 Complexity, Level 4 Complexity and Level 5 Complexity Use Cases in the accompanying Critical Capabilities report.

As supply chains grow in complexity, enterprises are looking to better orchestrate transportation and distribution processes with a unified supply chain execution solution. Industry experts agree that Manhattan’s cloud-native technology architecture and unified supply chain platform distinguishes Manhattan Active TM. This solution breaks down supply chain execution silos to deliver real-time visibility into shipments, offers predictive analytics for better decision-making, delivers the ability to automate manual processes and ultimately eliminates inefficiencies, which can be a game-changer for any company operating in complex and demanding environments.

Leader in TMS

“We are delighted to be recognized by Gartner as a Leader in TMS for the sixth time in a row,” said Bryant Smith, director of Product Management for Manhattan Associates. “Manhattan Active TM is designed to manage every transportation function, across any mode or size of network and leverages advanced intelligence to solve even the largest and most complex transportation challenges.”

Manhattan Active TM can be combined with Manhattan Active Warehouse Management and Manhattan Active Yard Management to provide companies a simplified and unified supply chain execution system that continuously adapts and scales to business needs, and provides a single, comprehensive view of the distribution network, unlocking optimization opportunities that are impossible with traditional siloed offerings.

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Stack Management and Crane Optimizer Goes Live

Inform has announced that it has successfully deployed its Syncrotess Optimization Plus solution at Norfolk Southern’s Rossville terminal just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, enabling the terminal to have transparency of their stacked operations.

The go-live at Rossville is the first of two planned go-lives this year, the second being scheduled at their larger, Austell facility located just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Rafael Velasquez, Director of Optimization and Integration at INFORM’s Terminal & Distribution Centre Logistics Division said, “After several successful live tests and careful planning, the entire team was confident in the solution going live at Rossville. Now, we’re laser focused on the next challenge with taking the system live at Norfolk Southern’s larger operation in Austell.”

INFORM’s optimization solution takes a modular approach to adding advanced intelligence to a terminal’s existing TOS. This path allows them to isolate the terminal’s specific challenges and provide a bespoke solution for their specific operational challenges. As an add-on optimization solution, Norfolk Southern have built the required optimization on top of their existing Terminal Operating System (TOS) OPTCS.

Dr. Eva Savelsberg, Senior Vice President at INFORM’s Terminal & Distribution Centre Logistics Division commented, “Our add-on optimization approach has proven very successful in the North American maritime market and I’m very excited to see that it is now up and running in the intermodal industry as well.”

INFORM has a suite of six industry proven optimization modules designed to improve operational efficiency reducing operational costs and allowing for improved revenues. They include: Crane Optimizer (CO), Yard Optimizer (YO), Vehicle Optimizer (VO), Train Load Optimizer (TLO), Rail Scheduler (RS), and Machine Learning (ML) modules.

Norfolk Southern is using INFORM’s Yard Optimizer (YO) to intelligently manage their stacked operations. The Yard Optimizer works in conjunction with TOS to allocate storage locations for containers within the yard as well as a suitable handover location, or transfer spot, for external trucks to use to minimize travel distance for the container into and out of the stack.

INFORM is the market leader in AI and optimization software to facilitate improved decision making. Based in Aachen, Germany, the company has been in the optimization business for 50 years and serves a wide span of logistics industries including ports, maritime, and intermodal terminals with both add-on optimization modules as well as TOS solutions.

Real Time Yard Management Solutions

Today, the largest European logistics platform gets one step closer to becoming real time in everything it does and expands its visibility solutions into Real-Time Yard Management. In addition, Transporeon announces a strategic partnership with Peripass to offer enhanced Yard Management Solutions. Peripass dedicates its expertise and technology to help companies digitize and optimize their logistics processes. Thanks to this partnership, companies can benefit from extended real-time visibility capabilities.

Today, most transport or warehouse activities are often optimized with Time Slot Management. Combining Time Slot Management with Real-Time Visibility information allows dynamic rebooking of time slots and provides a real time view on yard activities. Only few companies have invested in digitizing their entire yard operations in real-time. Nevertheless, yard management is key to gain total visibility on the entire digital supply chain. Yet for many companies, this is still a missing link in supply chain. Although transport or warehouse activities are often optimized or automated, relatively few companies have already invested in digitizing their yard operations. The yard is where a lot of additional value is ready to be collected. This fragmented and reductionistic view and management of the yard makes it very difficult for Shippers, Retailers, Carriers and Logistics Service Providers to utilize all available resources in the best possible way leading to reactive processes, a lack of flexibility and also increased waiting times.

Transporeon’s launch of Real Time Yard Management and its partnership with Peripass, the Yard Enabler, will deliver an experience of simplicity in a fully automated real time yard ensuring hassle-free logistics and augmented visibility. A solution that aims to ease yard management and automate different visitor and logistic flows, enables significant efficiency, cost savings and safety & security improvements for all Shippers, Retailers, Carriers and Logistics Service Providers running warehouses and cross-docks in Europe.

Stephan Sieber, Transporeon’s CEO, said: “Launching Real Time Yard Management and partnering with Peripass will deliver tremendous value to carriers, shippers and forwarders. By combining the two best offerings approaching the yard from the timeslot and from the physical yard and all in real time demonstrates the strength of our platform and delivers a fully integrated experience to our customers. The whole Transporeon team is excited about the cooperation with a thought-leading and dynamic team at Peripass that shares our passion of delivering outstanding value to our customers.”

Leander Naessens, Peripass CEO, added: “By offering a combined solution, we join forces, with on one hand innovative Yard Management Solutions from Peripass, and on the other hand time slot and dynamic slot management capabilities from Transporeon. This integrated solution increases real-time visibility between transport and yard operations. This is an absolutely unique offering for the digital logistic market and Peripass is proud to be part of it.”

Transporeon has been working on this co-innovation with key pilot customers in Europe and plans to release the product and make it generally available by April 2021. We have already common projects in our pipeline to have the solution combined which will soon lead to real cases.

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