Project Description:

Carter Express was contracted to manage all yard and last mile transportation moves for a large Japanese OEM in the southeast. The project includes both the plant location and the on-site warehouse. The warehouse consists of 2 million sq. ft. , 222 dock height doors, and a trailer lot that holds up to 500 trailers. Transportation moves consist of yard to door trailer placement and around 400 daily shuttles to the assembly plant.

Challenges:

During process investigation, Carter Express recognized that all yard activities were operated without centralized control:

• Drivers were receiving instructions from up to 20 different sources without a single point of prioritization or escalation.
• There was a lack of any standard work instructions or KPl's to assist employees with job training & decision making.
• Ultimately, the transportation operation was simply putting out fires instead of proactively planning based on a schedule.

Result:

• Carter Express on-boarded 137 drivers, many of which transferred from the incumbent service provider. Carter designed a proprietary yard management software (YMS) that allows an upload of daily production schedule.
• By utilizing the customer schedule. Carter Express can now make data driven decisions about load priority and staffing needs by hour.
• The YMS has also centralized all driver communication through one dispatch center.
• The customer can log-into the YMS to view live load tracking & on-time performance metrics.

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