The most challenging areas in freight are not the highways but the yards and docks across multitudes of shippers and receivers. The battle against utilization entropy is fought on the loading and unloading docks. It mostly happens inside a warehouse fence line, where a driver sits in a line of 10 trucks waiting to talk to one person behind a pane of glass.
YardFlow is expanding its yard automation software to all 200+ facilities of a beverage giant after a 26-site deployment. The shipper moved nearly 5% more freight with the same headcount according to a YardFlow analysis.
"That's tens of millions of dollars of incremental profit," Jake Koppinger, founder of YardFlow, told FreightWaves.
The customer is expanding the rollout from its largest facilities down to its smallest. "They're pushing us into all of their 200+ facilities, including their smallest, so biggest to smallest, because they want to see that standardization," Koppinger said.
YardFlow has processed close to 2 million shipments across the 26 sites. The system runs at three-nines or 99.9% uptime.
The problem YardFlow originally tackled began with paper. Specifically, the bill of lading handoff that still runs through a printer, a stapler and a slot in a window at thousands of U.S. distribution centers.
Koppinger walked through the analog process with a hypothetical example. A dock coordinator prints three copies, collates them, passes them through the glass, takes back a signature, then files the shipper's copy.
"They build up this big pile of paper, rubber band it, put a date on it, and put the pile in the box," he said. Once the box fills, it goes into storage for seven years to satisfy the statute of limitations.
That box becomes a cash problem roughly 60 days later. If a shipper invoices a retailer for 24 pallets and the retailer says it received 23, the dispute surfaces inside a lump-sum payment.
"You have like 50 invoices that get paid at once and it comes back in a lump sum of like $1.2 million. Well, I was expecting through those invoices $1.3 million. Now I've got to figure out why a hundred thousand's missing," Koppinger said. "So now there's a cash attribution issue."
Resolving it sends a dock coordinator into the warehouse to find the right box and dig out a two-month-old signature. That coordinator is the same person orchestrating forklift drivers, assigning yard spotters, dealing with truck drivers and replacing printer ink.
"What I like to equate that process to is like the old airport check-in process," Koppinger said. Drivers waiting in that line are accruing detention and risking on-time, in-full penalties on the delivery ahead.
Why Yard Automation Starts With the Driver, Not the Robot
YardFlow's core product is what Koppinger calls the driver journey: a digitized path from gate check-in through dock assignment to check-out and signed documentation. The system has processed close to 2 million shipments and runs at 99.9% uptime. Drivers need no app download, and QR code check-in is optional.
It's a design choice that reflects a constraint Koppinger calls non-negotiable. "If you have any issues where truck drivers are asked to download an app to get a digital bill of lading or something, they don't have it and then they're stuck there trying to download this app, they don't have connectivity," he said. "That causes problems with your operations."
The harder obstacle remains organizational. Warehouses run on tribal knowledge, and each one has its own unique operational peculiarities.
"You have people that have worked there for 20, 30 years and they're the ones that keep the lights on," Koppinger said. "Each warehouse can tend to operate its own silo because they're big operations." A single facility at a large retailer or consumer packaged goods company can generate hundreds of millions in revenue, which buys it the autonomy to do things its own way.
That level of autonomy makes reporting challenging. Facilities held to the same KPIs collect the data differently, leaving executives comparing the warehouse equivalent of apples to oranges.
Koppinger's counterargument is that every yard shares a few common denominators. Drivers arrive, check in, go somewhere, sign something and leave. "There's one common theme, one lowest common denominator that exists from an operational perspective that is sort of the heartbeat for how they ship products and generate revenue," he said.
With the driver journey deployed, the customer asked for a yard management system. YardFlow built one and is now deploying it, extending the same standardization to yard spotters, jockeys and trailer inventory.
The newer layer leverages machine vision, mounted at the gate and on the spotters themselves.
"If I tell a yard spotter to go take something from dock three and put it in spot four, the system has to trust that that's what they did," Koppinger said. "But if you can have an eye in the sky to actually validate the fact that they took it from dock three and put it in spot four, now we have something to cross-check that."
Cameras on moving spotters build what Koppinger describes as a digital twin of the yard. Gate cameras read arriving and departing trucks and trailers, validating carrier identity against DOT and MC numbers. That has direct implications for cargo theft and identity fraud, both of which have pushed shippers toward tighter gate controls.
Koppinger's pitch to shippers is deliberately unglamorous. He notes that is the point.
"There's a lot of AI pilot fatigue. You pilot something, it never goes anywhere. It's hard to scale," he said. Digital documentation and check-in workflows are "what I call sort of the steak relative to the sizzle."
He calls the sequencing an order of operations. "Let's get the operations fixed. Let's standardize your processes and protocols across your yards. Let's get everything digitized so that you can then be in a position to start layering in these other layers of automation," he said, rather than dropping an autonomous yard jockey into a facility where drivers still check in on clipboards.
Deployment speed reinforces the order. The driver journey and the yard management system go live in 30 minutes remotely. Machine vision requires on-site hardware installation and can take longer.
"We've seen companies take on yard modernization projects that take years to optimize one facility and then they struggle to get the next one on and scale across the pilot network, because there's a gap between theory and operational reality or just require too much change management at once," Koppinger said.
The endgame is a yard that can dispatch machines as easily as people, and Koppinger says the paperwork problem is what stands in the way.
"You're not going to be handing paperwork to an autonomous truck, right? You've got to be able to orchestrate an autonomous truck in through the gate, through the yard, tell them where to go in whatever the language that autonomous truck speaks," he said. "You've got to deal with both human spotters and autonomous spotters probably for the next 15 years. And so our system is kind of the brain that sits in the middle and orchestrates all of these different things to facilitate that autonomous yard."
The post YardFlow lands over 200-site yard automation deal appeared first on FreightWaves.
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