How Automation Is Improving Industrial Yard Visibility - The Industrial Lens Podcast

Industrial yards are constantly changing environments. Trailers arrive and depart, equipment moves between parking locations and dock doors, drivers check in and out, and loads wait to be processed. At a large manufacturing or distribution facility, hundreds or even thousands of these migrations can take place each day.

Keeping an accurate record of all that activity can be difficult, particularly when operators still rely on manual checks and data entry.

In a recent episode of The Industrial Lens podcast, Jeremy spoke with Ilhan Kolko, President and Managing Director of Aviro360, about how automation is being used to improve visibility across industrial yards and reduce the manual work involved in tracking activity.

How Yard Blindspots Create Delays

Aviro360 refers to this gap as yard blindness.

For example, a system may show that a trailer is parked in a particular location, while the trailer has actually been moved somewhere else. Finding it may require phone calls, radio communication, or someone physically traveling through the yard to locate it.

The challenge becomes larger as the number of trailers, parking locations, dock doors, and daily movements increases.

Manual inventory checks can introduce another problem. Operators may need to travel through the yard recording trailer numbers and locations before returning to enter that information into another system. By the time that process is complete, the yard may have already changed.

According to Ilhan, reducing this gap between the digital record and physical activity can help operators make decisions faster and spend less time searching for information.

Where Better Visibility Can Make A Difference

Accurate yard tracking can affect more than location alone. Ilhan says Aviro360 customers look at a range of performance indicators, including:

• Gate processing time
• Yard inventory accuracy
• Trailer and equipment location accuracy
• Search time
• Dwell time
• Detention
• Pickup and drop-off accuracy
• Throughput
• Spoilage for time-sensitive loads

For example, Ilhan says Aviro360 can reduce gate entry and exit processing to less than 15 seconds per vehicle in situations where the same process may otherwise take several minutes. He also cites an average reduction of at least eight minutes in search time per item being located. These are Aviro360's reported performance figures and can vary by operation.

Visibility can also matter when the load itself is time-sensitive. Ilhan gave the example of refrigerated or perishable goods being left in a large yard without being properly recorded. Losing track of one load can create much larger consequences than the time spent looking for it.

A Flexible Approach to Yard Automation

Industrial environments introduce conditions that can be difficult for automated systems. Rain, snow, slush, changing lighting conditions, large outdoor areas, network connectivity, and even movement of the structures supporting cameras can affect performance.

Ilhan says Aviro360 has addressed many of these challenges through successive generations of its hardware and software. Current systems are designed to identify equipment without depending entirely on clearly marked parking spaces or visible dock numbers.

Infrastructure also varies significantly from one facility to another. Some sites already have power, networking, gate equipment, and existing yard management software in place. Others may have very little infrastructure.

Aviro360 begins with a site survey to identify requirements for power, connectivity, and other preparation. For remote locations, Ilhan says the company has even used satellite connectivity where conventional networking was not practical. The system can also integrate with an existing TMS, YMS, ERP, or other system of record rather than requiring an operator to replace the software already in use.