BY JAMES A. COOKE, EDITOR AT LARGE
YARD MANAGEMENT
technologyreview
IN THE SPRING OF 2012, A NEW PLANT MANAGER
assessing the operations at the Daimler Trucks North America
(DTNA) plant in Saltillo, Mexico, made a request to corporate
headquarters: Find a way to handle the 1,000 or so trailers that
were creating chaos in the yard. Daimler’s information technology
(IT) department got involved, deciding the plant should use a cloud-based yard management system (YMS).
What led the truck maker to take the cloud route rather than buy
the necessary software? It was largely a question of infrastructure,
according to the company. “Working in Mexico is hard,” says
Roderick Flores, a technology manager at DTNA’s headquarters in
Portland, Ore. “We did not want to have to set up servers in
Mexico. That’s why we chose a service solution in the cloud.”
CLOUD CONTROL
Daimler Trucks North America, the largest manufacturer of heavy-and medium-duty trucks in North America, operates four factories in
the United States and two in Mexico. Its Saltillo plant is one of DTNA’s main facilities for making its
Freightliner Cascadia line of Class 8 trucks.
Every truck made in Saltillo requires at least a trailer and a half worth of parts from suppliers, according to
Flores. In the past, the Saltillo plant would keep paper records on all of the inbound trailers in its yard and
coordinate the yard jockeys that were repositioning the trailers with handheld radios.
The new yard management solution—a system from Alameda, Calif.-based software developer Pinc
Solutions—has changed all that. The application, which became fully operational in March, uses passive
radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in conjunction with the cloud software. (Unlike so-called active
tags, which have their own power source, passive tags must be “energized” by an outside device to transmit a
signal identifying their location.)
Today, when a shipment from a supplier shows up at the plant, the guard checks in the truck at the gate and
affixes a tag to the trailer’s bottom corner. The tag links the trailer to a particular driver and bill of lading. The
tag stays on until the guard removes the device at checkout.
Occasionally, a shipment with urgently needed parts goes directly to the dock door of the plant. However, a
trailer normally gets parked in a staging area in the yard. The trailer’s location is pinpointed by antennas
mounted on “yard mules,” special trucks that reposition the trailers within the yard.
When Daimler Trucks North America decided it
needed a yard management system for one of
its Mexican plants, it went to the cloud.
Managing the yard
from the cloud
