Yard Management

Yard management covers everything that happens between a truck entering a facility's gate and backing into a dock door – plus what happens after it pulls away from the dock and exits. The yard is the buffer zone where trailers wait for available doors, staged loads sit ready for carrier pickup, and empty trailers are stored until needed. Managing this space effectively requires knowing exactly where every trailer is, what's in it, how long it's been there, and when it needs to move.

A yard management system (YMS) typically tracks trailer location by yard spot number, trailer status (loaded, empty, in transit to dock, ready for pickup), dwell time, seal integrity, and – for refrigerated trailers – temperature monitoring. Yard jockeys or hostlers receive move instructions from the YMS to reposition trailers between yard spots and dock doors. The system coordinates with dock scheduling to ensure the right trailer is at the right door at the right time.

Without yard management discipline, facilities develop predictable problems: trailers get lost in large yards, drivers spend 30+ minutes hunting for the right trailer, dock doors sit idle while loaded trailers wait in the wrong spot, and detention charges accumulate because nobody realized a carrier's truck has been waiting since morning. For high-volume facilities running hundreds of trailer moves per day, yard inefficiency directly translates into wasted dock capacity and higher freight costs.

Yard management is closely tied to dock scheduling – an organized dock calendar is much less effective if the yard is chaotic and trailers can't reach doors on time. Shippers who optimize both functions together see compounding benefits in throughput and carrier satisfaction.