Bridget McCrea, Contributing Editor for Logistics Management, recently published an article about the importance of a YMS, or Yard Management System. She reached out to a few top industry experts to get their thoughts on why it’s so vital to implement and maintain a proper YMS. St. Onge Company’s Howard Turner was one such expert, and he spoke about why companies are focused on integrating their YMS with their WMS.
Howard Turner, director of supply chain systems at St. Onge Company, says companies that need help managing their large, private fleets are showing particular interest in YMS right now.
According to Turner, most of them are focused on improving inventory management and need a way to track where it’s coming into, sitting out in, or exiting the yard. In absence of a YMS, tracking these movements requires much manual work and human intervention.
Turner says that companies are also looking for good WMS/YMS integration. A company that wants to get better visibility into its inbound deliveries, for instance, can use the item master data to identify the products, number of cases, stock keeping units (SKUs) and associated purchase orders for those deliveries. A lot of that information exists in the WMS at the purchase-order level.
“When the YMS can share that information with the WMS, once that trailer is moved from the yard to a dock door location to begin unloading, you automatically know what’s on the trailer,” Turner explains, “and what you should be expecting to receive and unload.”
Click here to read the article on the Modern Materials Handling site!
