Maintaining a safe, secure, and highly efficient yard and terminal is often an ideal goal, but here’s how you can turn it into reality with technologies for better tracking and real-time operational visibility.
It all starts with having visibility into and connectivity among all your assets, people, and processes. This allows you to streamline your workflows, continuously track cargo, connect your workforce, ensure compliance, and minimize waiting and turnaround times.
The key to achieving these benefits is deploying the right technologies. Specifically, you need mobile devices, scanning and/or location technology, and a yard management system.
Whether you have some, all, or none of these elements in place, you need the right solutions. That’s where we come into play.
Our partners are global leaders in mobile computing, barcode scanning, RFID, and printing solutions for the transportation and logistics industry. They produce devices designed specifically for yard and terminal efficiency, visibility, and safety.
By leveraging these technologies, we’ve helped many leading T&L operations achieve huge improvements in their productivity, efficiency, compliance, and safety. Here are some ways you can do the same.
Using Mobile & RFID Technologies in Your Yard and Terminal
Using an RFID tag, you can capture inbound trailer-load information at the gate and relay that information to an automated yard management system (YMS). RFID tags can uniquely identify any asset you want to track and match it with additional information about that asset in a database.
Workers can then access this information through handheld mobile computers and quickly schedule dock door assignments.
By leveraging the same technology, they can also know what is in every container or trailer as soon as it enters the gate. Your YMS stores this information so your workers can access it with mobile devices and ensure the safest and most efficient cargo handling.
In addition, this visibility means your workers can access needed information on the go and unlock and cross-dock urgent shipments without leaving the yard.
Mobile computing technologies also boost worker communication and coordination by giving workers the same features as a PBX system on their mobile devices. This means you can eliminate desk phone dependence.
You can also give workers push-to-talk capabilities over cellular and Wi-Fi networks, as well as the ability to send texts or images when conditions are too loud for voice communication.
These same technologies also allow you to start operating more strategically—proactive planning rather than struggling to react. For example, you can use the data and information you collect through your YMS to identify opportunities to streamline your processes and utilize your docks and yard space more effectively.
You can also stay ahead of equipment maintenance by proactively and electronically tracking and monitoring equipment conditions. The tracking and data capture capabilities in our products make it easy to monitor container conditions for compliance and associate workers with loading and unloading tasks.
You can even automate accountability and worker safety by tracking worker time, attendance, and location with RFID badges and scanning devices.
The right devices, systems, and configuration may vary based on your specific needs and environment, so it’s often best to explore the possibilities by working with a T&L technology expert.
At Informs, we can help you create and execute a winning T&L technology strategy with assistance from our experienced and highly qualified systems engineers. We can help you at every stage of the process—from systems design to hardware, deployment, maintenance, and support.
Contact us at 616-399-7010 or email us at [email protected] to get started.
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