Enabling resilient yard management supports running sustainable and resilient yard processes
As a yard manager, you are faced with numerous challenges daily, from managing the flow of transportation units like trucks or containers in and out of the yard, to ensuring that the drivers and their vehicles are planned properly, are in time and processed efficiently in the yard.
With so many moving parts to keep track of, it can be easy to overlook the importance of having a resilient yard management plan in place.
In this blog post, we will explore the concept of resilient yard management and how it can help you to achieve more sustainable and efficient operations.
What is Resilient Yard Management?
Resilient yard management refers to the ability of a yard to withstand and recover from adverse conditions and challenges. This involves implementing strategies and systems that help to mitigate the impact of disruptions, such as weather events, traffic congestion, and maintenance issues.
The goal of resilient yard management is to ensure that your yard continues to operate smoothly, even in the face of unexpected obstacles. This not only protects your reputation and bottom line, but it also helps to foster a more sustainable and efficient operation.
Why is Resilient Yard Management Important?
There are many reasons why resilient yard management is important, including:
- Improving Efficiency: Resilient yard management helps to improve the overall efficiency of your operation. By having strategies in place to mitigate the impact of disruptions, you can minimize downtime and reduce the number of unexpected delays.
- Protecting Reputation: Resilient yard management can also help to protect your reputation as a reliable and efficient truck yard. When your yard is able to continue operating smoothly in the face of adversity, it builds trust with your customers and helps to establish your yard as a leader in the industry.
- Promoting Sustainability: Resilient yard management is also an important aspect of promoting sustainability. By minimizing disruptions and reducing downtime, you are able to reduce your carbon footprint and minimize the negative impact of your operation on the environment.
Tips for Implementing Resilient Yard Management
- Plan for Disruptions: The first step in implementing resilient yard management is to plan for disruptions. This involves identifying potential sources of disruptions, such as weather events and traffic congestion, and developing strategies to mitigate their impact.
- Invest in Technology: Another important aspect of resilient yard management is investing in technology. This can include real-time tracking systems and predictive analytics to anticipate and prevent disruptions.
- Foster a Culture of Collaboration: Resilient yard management also requires fostering a culture of collaboration. This involves encouraging open communication and collaboration between all members of your team, including drivers, dispatchers, and maintenance personnel.
Implement a resilient Yard Management with SAP Yard Logistics
SAP Yard Logistics is the perfect basis for building a resilient and sustainable yard management system that will help you to run your business in the best way.
By using its planning capabilities, the system will provide you upfront with the information about planned incoming and outgoing transports as well internal activities. Scheduling in- and outgoing transports is also important to reduce consumption of parking laces or avoiding traffic jams. The dock appointment scheduling tool with SAP Yard Logistics is taking care of those time slots and can be used to coordinate with suppliers and carriers to ensure the supply and demand fits to the needs of the business by not using extensive parking capacities or human capital for gate agents and security.
Based on this information, identification of bottle necks is possible as well as the initiation of manual or system-guided counter measures. An optimizer-based planning scenario like the berth planning considers the different workload inputs, putting them on a Gannt-chart timeline, thereby visualizing the planning result.
The Yard Cockpit as graphical representation helps to evaluate the yard occupation and supports dependent activities to keep operations running in the best manner.
Based on the personal work lists and the depending default queries and layouts, the employees do see the data they need on the first view and do not need to search the system for information. This also helps to identify issues and solve them before they could materialize in a supply chain disruption. Finally, the alerting features enable the automatic notification of the users about late transports, broken transportation units and all other issues. Those can be visualized in the yard cockpit as well as in a specific alert monitor. Due to configurable follow-up actions the system ensures that also those disruptions are handled in an efficient way, potentially completely automatic.
Using Business Rule Framework Plus (BRF+) which provides a comprehensive application programming interface and user interface for defining business rules, it enables you to define business rules without the need of writing ABAP code.
With one can configure rulesets, that steer the yard completely. The yard manager only needs to manage exceptions and thereby leverages SAP Yard Logistics to run a stable and efficient Yard Management. One more aspect in terms of sustainability is the mobile and the automation scenario. Paper-based processes take time and consume resources, natural and human ones. By providing mobile apps to the yard operator, we reduce these consumptions significantly. No additional printouts as well as the optimized travelling inside the yard without empty runs will significantly reduce the carbon dioxide footprint of your business and help to archive sustainability goals of the company as well securing our overall future.
Conclusion: Plan for disruption through technology and collaboration
In conclusion, resilient yard management is an important aspect of operating a sustainable and efficient yard. By planning for disruptions, investing in technology, and fostering a culture of collaboration, you can ensure that your yard is able to continue operating smoothly, even in the face of adversity. So, make sure to incorporate these strategies into your SAP Yard Logistics implementation plan and utilize its capabilities to build resilient, sustainable and future-proof yard operations.
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