HYDRA

Walmart YMS

Yard Management System is a next-generation YMS platform for Walmart's distribution centers. Its made up of different cloud-native applications that provide real-time visibility on trailers and assets.

Some of the project's KPIs

DWELL
TIMES

Time trailers are on the same status

ON TIME
YARD EXIT

% of trailers that leave the yard before or at cutoff time

TRAILER
UTILIZATION

Cubic space utilized on shipping trailers

EMISSIONS
REDUCTION

Emissions reduce by
pre-cooling trailers on demand

Users

SECURITY
GATE

Gate in/out trailers

YARD
JOCKEYS

Move trailers from yard to door or viceversa

DOCK
ASSOCIATES

Download or load trailers

MANAGERS

Manage yard operations

To understand this project is important to picture the scale at which the largest retail company on the planet operates. Imagine thousand of trailers coming IN and OUT, moving around and changing status every hour on a distribution center (node).

Some trailers are bringing items to restore the building, some are leaving full of products to replenish a store, others could be empties just waiting to be used and some had a strict cutoff time by which they need to leave the facility to fulfill our delivery promise to customers.

Now imagine managing that using Excel Sheets or systems that were build in the '90s.

Problems with legacy systems

Not fully integrated with other systems
Only accessible at a stationary computer
Does not require an order of operations
Limited user access control
In some buildings, paper becomes a source of truth over YMS
Requires a lot of training
Low On-Time Yard Exit
Low trailer utilization
Causes customer-facing issues

To solve these problems was needed to research the end-to-end yard management operations on different building types conducting an uncountable amount of interviews with users and managers. We needed to understand the available opportunities holistically in the entire system and specifically on each job function.

Opportunities

Enforce order of operations to avoid losing track of assets
Prioritize trailers based on urgency levels to always have inventory
Integrate with other systems to improve visibility into the status of receiving and shipments
Create a foundation for management dashboards to make the yard more efficient by tracking productivity and monitoring events
Simplify driver journey to reduce dwell time
Increase OTYE close to 100%
Maximize trailer utilization

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Research document: Trailer and tractors journeys

Solution

We rethink each job function from the ground up, choosing the right type of device for the task at hand and create a suite of cloud-native applications that pass information to each other and other systems.

Buildings vary between themselves depending on the type and function, but all will have these areas in common:

A Security Gate where truck drivers check-in and out of the facility.

A Yard where tractors and trailers operate.

A Dock where trailers are assigned to a building door to load or unload.

Each one of these areas is taking care of by Walmart associates that perform different functions using YMS applications:

Gate App

Allows gate security associates to check IN/OUT trailers and do inspections. Automatically assigns a dropoff location.

Yard Moves App

A vehicle-mounted computer that enables yard jockeys to move trailers from yard to doors and vice versa. Updates an asset's location in

real-time to other systems.

Y2D---Can't-Pickup-Empty-Shipping---03-(

Yard Audit App

Allows associates to audit yards and do trailer inspections.

Dock Apps

Allow associates to open download or fill trailers. There are many different versions of the dock app based on operations variables at different node types.

Manager Apps

Besides the tools for operations, this ecosystem has tablet and desktop applications for managers.

The desktop applications are used by building managers to monitor and edit node-setups Allows managers to create, edit and delete moves and change trailer information from anywhere in the building.