Whether your business primarily ships shoes to wholesalers or magnets to electronics manufacturers, your efficiency is key to your success. While you may have spent countless hours ensuring that your warehousing and packaging systems are optimized, there is one process that you might have overlooked - yard management.
What is Yard Management?
Put simply, yard management is the process of overseeing the comings and goings of trucks and trailers at distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, and warehouses. It is commonly used in conjunction with warehouse and transportation management systems to allow workers to fill orders as efficiently as possible.
What Are the Benefits of Yard Management Systems?
Now that you know what yard management is, you are almost certainly wondering how it can help your business to grow and thrive. The answer, as it turns out, is multi-faceted.
First and foremost, intelligent yard management systems can give companies more visibility over the trucks and merchandise that pass through a warehouse or distribution center. This visibility makes it easy to track specific SKUs and prevent unnecessary bottlenecks.
Of course, when companies have improved visibility, it also becomes significantly easier for them to predict upcoming challenges and create smart plans to overcome them. Such plans may include setting appointments for drivers or increasing the number of employees in a yard.
When increased visibility and an improved ability to create workable plans come together, the end result is almost always a faster asset turnaround. As such, 
companies that use efficient yard management systems can often cut their overall trailer pool by more than 25 percent.
For businesses that primarily sell and ship high-value merchandise, loss prevention is the main benefit of yard management. When sophisticated software is constantly tracking the workers on-site and the goods that they are moving, it becomes almost impossible for items to be stolen or get lost.
This lack of shrinkage, coupled with the ability to create actionable plans and turn assets around more quickly, means that intelligent yard management systems can also save businesses quite a lot of money. It is not unusual for companies to lower their distribution costs by as much as 20 percent when they institute such a program. Once these savings have been made, businesses may then be able to cut their prices and entice customers to place larger, more frequent orders.
Of course, business owners are under no obligation to pass their savings along to their clients in this way. If they wish, they can also use these funds to purchase new equipment, hire more employees, or invest in other, more important areas of the organization.
At American Manufacturing Solutions, we have been providing yard management solutions to small and large companies throughout the United States for years. Whether you need help moving goods from business to business or warehouse to warehouse, we've got you covered. To learn more about our services, just pick up the phone and give us a call at (419) 300-1007 or send us a message online. We look forward to working with you!
