Being in a solution based industry, we believe technology should be nothing other than a solution to a problem. However, not having your organization’s specific needs met due to using the wrong tools will only make matters worse. In this article, we break down the differences between using a “best-of-breed” yard management system and a WMS yard module to help you identify which will have a more significant impact on improving your supply chain operations as a whole.
There are numerous warehouse management systems (WMS) that offer "Yard Modules" as application extensions to manage yard operations. For some companies, a WMS Yard Module may be sufficient to manage their yard operation, but for others, the benefits of a best-of-breed Yard Management Software application are critical to the success of their logistics operations.
Perhaps the best way to explain the differences between a WMS "Yard Module" and a "best-of-breed" Yard Management Software is to use the following analogy based on the WMS market.
In the WMS market, there are inventory control applications that keep track of where operators have stored inventory in the past so that inventory can quickly be located when it is needed. These basic applications do not necessarily optimize the work being performed, rather they identify what has already taken place in the past as a means to controlling inventory. This is a very different scenario than a best-of-breed WMS that enables the optimization of personnel, equipment, and order picking/packing processes, to support world class operations at the highest levels of efficiency.
This same principal applies to the Yard Management Software market. A "Yard Module" (a WMS application extension) typically tells you where to find trailers in the yard based on where they have been placed in the past. This allows the yard driver to move trailers to dock doors without having to manually search for the trailer in the yard. This is the equivalent of an inventory control system in that the software tells you where the trailer was placed without any real intelligence aimed at optimizing resources or assets.
WMS "Yard Modules" typically manage the yard operation as an extension of the warehouse operation. As such, it is worth noting that WMS software applications are principally designed to:
With a "best-of-breed" Yard Management Software, the application is specifically oriented towards optimizing the use of labor resources and the movement of trailers within the yard. Since the characteristics of each logistics site are different, the priority on how trailers are managed within the yard needs to be managed differently for each site. A best-of-breed YMS enables a firm to specify the exact priorities of how tasks are assigned to yard drivers based on site-specific operational requirements. For example, the emphasis for one site may be on maximizing yard driver labor efficiency, while another site may need to maximize inventory fill rates. The key point is that the "best-of-breed YMS" provides a much more robust and flexible toolkit to managing the overall logistics operation.
It is important to understand that YMS applications are designed around a fundamentally different set of operational requirements than WMS applications. YMS applications are principally designed to:
Most importantly, best-of-breed YMS applications enable the establishment of user-defined rules to manage how the work is executed. Some examples follow:
There may be a need to maximize labor efficiency of the drivers responsible for shunting trailers in the yard, especially if the operation is contained within a large campus environment whereby trailers are being transferred between multiple buildings. In this situation, the priority may be having the YMS constantly analyse the pool of work to assign drivers the most optimal tasks.
In summary, there are significant differences between the benefits of deploying a system-directed "best-of-breed" Yard Management System versus a more basic "Yard Module" extension of a WMS. It is important to understand the differences between these solutions in order to make the appropriate choice for your business.