Yard solutions help connect the dots in a dynamic environment

Dot Foods is a privately owned national redistributor with more than 4,500 employees. Because the company serves as a link between manufacturers and distributors of all sizes in all channels, it sought to improve coordination between yard management and operations inside the four walls. By deploying a modern yard management platform, the company has improved visibility and efficiencies throughout the company.

In the company’s largest facility, 255 dock doors process 2,000 purchase orders per week. According to Troy Schenk, warehouse systems manager, the existing legacy system had fallen out of support and lacked several valuable functions.

“The previous system was not database-driven, and couldn’t tie to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or other information systems to make data digestible,” Schenk says. “With no visibility, we had to do a lot of tracking, inventory management and IT support ourselves.”

Schenk says the new yard management platform IBS is more streamlined, configurable and scalable while working in a standard IT environment. He says workers appreciate the visual aspects of the updated user interface, which offers a more modern look and feel. Schenk and his team appreciate the ability to integrate with other systems for improved connectivity and visibility into yard information.

“But we needed more than just the ability to track trailers in yard,” Schenk says. “We also had a specific set of needs around workflow management.”

In the beginning phases of integrating the new system the team tied yard information into portage planners and dashboards to show whether or not product was present in the yard, and to locate its purchase order. Dot Foods is currently using the platform to manage workflows based on what is in the yard, but Schenk says the company has plans to further leverage the system’s capabilities.

“I think there’s value in extending the system to include GPS on the trucks to know what’s coming in and do some pre-planning,” he says. “This could ultimately enable us to pre-cool trailers, coordinate carrier scheduling and manage remote lots.”