As a multinational food manufacturer, our customer needs to manage large volumes of packaging and cartons, while overcoming the challenges of a huge warehouse management complex. As the company grew, so did the number of products and trucks needed for safe and accurate management. The company was preparing to switch from semi-trailers to swap bodies, which would more than double the distances needed to manage yard operations. Therefore, the company needed a new organizational method to accommodate this operational change.
In internal yard traffic, truck drivers were given manual call orders with instructions to take trucks to the correct bridges and gates. The lack of real-time digital location tracking and a significant amount of idle time made it difficult to estimate when a truck would arrive at a swap gate. In addition, there was a recent switch from semi-trailers, which can hold 33 pallets, to swap gates, which hold a maximum of 18 pallets. This change doubles the number of trips that need to be coordinated with truck drivers, all without a targeted system, resulting in more work and bottlenecks for the team to manage.
At this point, it became clear that the customer's manual approach to coordinating internal plant traffic would no longer suffice. In addition, this customer's operation was highly dependent on a precise and well-timed schedule. If truck arrival times are delayed, the entire production process is slowed. This resulted in wasted money, time, and resources as trucks had to be located, redirected to the designated swap body location, and guided to exit while others waited to be dispatched. As a result, there was a continued increase in idle time, which delayed subsequent production steps.
The customer urgently needed a better system for internal plant coordination that would provide transparency through real-time locations of trucks and swap bodies in the yard as a first step. That's why the company turned to Inpixon's team. The request was to use RTLS and Inpixon's INTRANAV.IO platform to create a better process that was more efficient, accurate, and precise.
