DC Velocity - November 2012

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the-minute information on the whereabouts of a trailer.

If you’re in the market for a YMS, what should you look for? We asked several industry experts for their advice. What follows are their recommendations for five “must have” capabilities:

1Appointment scheduling. Any YMS worth its salt should offer an appointment scheduling capability, according to the experts. Setting a time and date for a truck to arrive at the distribution center is critical to managing work flow in the yard and in the facility itself.

“From a warehouse operations perspective, the first and foremost feature is robust appointment scheduling func-tionality,” says Mike Pujda, a project manager at the consulting firm Tompkins International Inc.

Pujda recommends choosing a YMS that incorporates a “self-service” online portal that suppliers can use to schedule delivery appointments for inbound shipments. Once the appointment is made, the program should be able to take information on the load—such as the type of shipment and its priority—and match it to available receiving capacity at the DC. This should relieve DC employees of the task of manually scheduling appointments.

2Alerts. For operations facing capacity or labor con- straints, using trailers for temporary overflow storage can eliminate the need to rent costly satellite storage space. “Usually, you’re allowed to keep a trailer for a number of days if you don’t own it. So, you want to maximize the free rent days,” says Phil Obal, president of the consulting firm IDII.

But there’s a catch: Hold a trailer too long and you risk incurring demurrage charges, which are penalties imposed by motor carriers for a consignee’s failure to unload and return a trailer within a designated time period. That’s why Obal strongly recommends choosing a YMS that alerts the manager when a trailer return deadline is approaching.

3User-defined rules. Since each company’s priorities are different, the YMS should allow the user to set up his or her own rules specifying when certain trailers get pulled forward in a yard, says Wulfraat.

This capability allows the logistics manager to ensure scheduling reflects the company’s individual needs and priorities—whether the objective is to maximize sales, optimize customer service, or simply deal with scheduling constraints. For instance, a logistics manager could have the YMS flag trailers that contain inventory needed to fill back orders for prompt unloading. Or the YMS could organize trailer movements and unloading based on workforce requirements.