Rail Yard Planning, Tracking & Execution –
Rail yards can often become a dark spot in the supply chain. Rail logistics managers often find themselves asking questions such as: “When are railcars available to ship?” and “What is the status of the railcar?” Meanwhile, rail yard managers and operators who are eagerly trying to improve throughput often find themselves asking “Where is my railcar?” and “Which railcars are available to load?” With a lack of visibility and planning tools, these questions are difficult to answer.
Yard and Transload Management (YTM) shines a light on these dark spots by offering a powerful tool to plan, execute, and track railcar management activities.
- Planning
- Powered by integrating with TRAX, rail yard operators gain visibility to all railcars en route to their terminal including shipment details and ETA. This allows yard operators to anticipate when railcars will be available to switch, load, and unload. Speaking of loading, with the YTM Fulfilment Planner tool, rail managers can plan and optimize load rack operations. YTM Fulfilment Planner is an intuitive tool that allows users to assign cars to loading spots and assign customer purchase orders on a single screen. Yard operators are ready to execute with work orders in hand due to these planning capabilities powered by the fulfillment planner.
- Execution
- Once the railcar arrives in the yard, operators can execute railcar management activities and update the system. In both desktop and mobile environments, operators can execute switch work orders, inspect railcar and load/unload railcars. In addition to core railcar management activities, operators can apply defects, custom statuses, and comments that can be viewed by anyone in the organization. Users can easily execute eBOL EDI to the railroad directly from YTM once the railcar is loaded and ready to ship.
- Tracking
- YTM gives the power of visibility. Always know where your railcars are in the yard with a graphical railyard view. YTM Yardview not only provides a real-time snapshot of your yard inventory but has many configurable visual tools to help pinpoint bottlenecks and yard performance. Need to know where and how many cars have been inspected and which ones failed with defects? Yardview color rules let you pinpoint all of that and more in seconds!
Need to track railcar activities?
YTM tracks who and when all railcar activities are performed with a visible railcar audit trail.
Need to track customer order fulfillment progress?
YTM tracks PO fulfillment against shipments and stores all railcar inspections indefinitely to be retrieved as needed.
Automation & Consolidation of data from multiple systems
In today’s rail yard, there can be many operating systems and email correspondence in play. This often means rail yard managers are updating many systems with redundant data.
Here are some of the ways YTM can eliminate multiple touchpoints and streamline data:
- Connecting Railroad Integration:
- Served by a shortline? Eliminate emails and phone calls through our shortline integration tool which allows you to gain visibility into available railcars and request railroad actions directly from YTM.
- AEI readers:
- Do you utilize AEI scanning? Automate railcar positioning in the yard through integrated fixed and handheld AEI readers.
- Purchase Orders:
- Do you use an ERP to track customer purchase orders? Using YTM Purchase Order API you can pull open purchase orders directly into the yard tool and return shipment information against purchase orders to the ERP once the shipment has been executed.
- Rail Scales:
- Does your yard use rail scales to capture rail weight? Great! YTM can pull that information in and automate loads based on those weights
- Customer Reports:
- Do you provide daily inventory and fulfillment reports to your customers? Eliminate manual report creation, emails, and phone calls providing your customer access through the YTM customer portal.
For additional information, or if you have any questions, please email info@kaleris.com. We are also hosting a YTM Webinar in September, Register Here!
Written By: Kelly Jensen (Senior Product Manager)
