Yard management

Depending upon size of warehouse operation, numerous vehicles visit the facility. For example, apparel warehouse operating on 30,000 SQM facility can see approximately 40 vehicles a day.   These vehicles arrive at a random time. Therefore, space is required for vehicles to wait till their processing turn comes up. This temporary space for vehicle halting is called yard.

The objective of yard management is to oversee movement of vehicles in yard of warehouse. It is important to track real time information of vehicle location and allows yard employees to move vehicles from yard to dock for loading or unloading.

Dock management

Managing dock in the warehouse is essential because it enables optimisation of vehicle loading & unloading process. The objective of dock management is to reduce wait time for trucks in the yard. In order to efficiently schedule operations at loading or unloading docks it is important to have visibility on the following.

1. availability of loading and unloading docks at any given time
2. docks currently in use and their planned schedule of availability

Basis above visibility on docks, dock employee allocates dock to vehicles for loading or unloading goods. Normally FIFO is followed for dock allocation, means vehicle which has arrived first in the warehouse is preferred over other vehicles while allocating dock. Some suppliers are given priority status, in this case, these supplier vehicles are given priority while allocating dock.