A manufacturing line stops if there’s no empty trailer on the dock. Yet most sites cannot say how many trailers they actually need, or what their shunters did all shift.
On a manufacturing site the yard has one job that cannot slip: an empty trailer on the dock before the line needs it. Miss it and the line stops, which is the most expensive thing that happens on site that day.
Walk round most UK manufacturing yards and you’ll find two things nobody can put a number on: how many trailers the site actually needs, and what the shunters did all shift.
Stand trailers start out sensible. Drop the trailer, release the vehicle, use it as storage until the line calls for it. Then the fleet grows quietly, because nobody wants to be the person who sent a trailer back the week before it was needed.
Shunters go the same way. The complaints barely change from site to site: no real visibility on what the team is doing, long idle spells, instructions shouted over an intercom. And inside the team everyone knows who carries the shift and who picks up the slack. Outside it, nobody does.
“Most sites assume they have to fix the whole yard at once,” says Jim Wardlaw, co-founder of YardOps. “They don’t. Start with the shunters: a tablet in each cab, moves sequenced centrally, and within a few weeks the driving around and the guesswork are gone. Everyone outside the yard finally gets a straight answer on where a trailer is and when it will be on the dock.”
Both of those costs are unusually easy to quantify. Trailer leases and shunter vehicles sit as fixed monthly lines in a budget, and utilisation data shows within weeks how many of each an operation actually needs. On margins measured in single percentage points, that arithmetic is usually what gets a project signed off.
