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Deployment at a manufacturing plant with three gates
Before the deployment, transports arrived whenever they liked. Nobody planned which vehicle would turn up when, so trucks waiting to load or unload stood at the gate and on site. The queue was not caused by a shortage of docks, but by everyone arriving when it suited them. The waiting vehicles blocked internal roads and entrances, so one transport’s problem became the whole plant’s problem.
The plant introduced delivery booking, meaning a requirement to book a slot in advance, and the carrier portal, in which haulage companies arrange their slots themselves, without phoning the plant. An information kiosk went in at the gate, where drivers report their arrival without involving security, and drivers receive clearance to enter by SMS.
The order of handling stopped depending on who pulled up first and started following the bookings. A vehicle without a booking does not just drive in, and a vehicle with a booking drives in when the plant is ready for it, with the driver finding out by SMS while waiting off site. The ‘what time should I come?’ conversations moved from the security desk phone to the portal.
What the deployment did not solve
The technology alone did not get rid of the peak-time queue. It only shifted once the plant made the organisational decision that a delivery without a booking is handled after the booked ones. TraxSystem exposes a capacity problem, but it cannot replace the change of rule that removes it.
Nobody measured the effect, so there are no figures here: no reduction in waiting time, no number of vehicles per day, no percentages.
Typical deployment scope at other types of site
The summaries for the other types of site describe the TraxSystem scope most often rolled out, and do not relate to specific customers.
At a logistics centre, the usual scope is delivery booking with time slots and the carrier portal, the warehouse day plan, the dock dispatcher and the entry log at the gate. In a second phase, number plate recognition at the entrance and the kiosk are the most common additions. The flashpoint is bookings nobody turns up for, which is why the automatic no-show rule matters more at a logistics centre than anywhere else.
At a logistics park with tenants, the scope covers the entry log at the shared gate, separate visibility scopes for the tenants and a carrier portal for each of them. What needs the most agreement, before go-live, is who the controller of personal data is and how responsibility is divided between the park manager and the tenants.
A plant with a railway siding rolls out rail traffic with wagons, tracks and wagon lists, weighing and the rail carrier portal, and adds road traffic in a second phase. The usual difficulty is matching wagon identification with the transport documents, so that the list in the system and the list on paper refer to the same units.
On a site under physical security, the scope covers patrols with checkpoints, the duty log, incidents and lone-working post check-ins. The hardest part is the first few weeks, when the guards see the checkpoint scans as a way of checking up on them. That passes once it becomes clear that a documented patrol protects the employee above all.
What happens in every deployment
The first two weeks bring out cases the analysis did not foresee: a vehicle without plates, a driver without a document, a delivery at two in the morning, a reader failure on a Friday afternoon. It almost always ends with a change of setting, with no programming work, and that is why TraxSystem has so many settings.
The greatest value only appears with the second area. The entry log on its own brings order to the gate, but the entry log together with access control and inductions answers questions nobody asked before, because there was nowhere to ask them.
Resistance comes from the staff, not from management. An operator for whom the system adds a minute to every vehicle will find a way around it. That is why the TraxSystem registration screen is used from the keyboard, with details suggested from the history.
A demo set up for your site
The easiest way to judge whether TraxSystem fits is on your own process. In the demo we run through the whole process, set up for your gates and your rules.
See what a demo looks likeCalculate your price
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Further reading: Truck queues at the gate · Where to start at a manufacturing plant · How long implementation takes