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A day in a warehouse without delivery bookings
A warehouse with a dozen or more docks and several dozen carriers that works without bookings has its day broken up by phone calls about times. In the morning five freight forwarders ring with the same question. At midday the warehouse rings to say that a vehicle nobody was expecting is standing at dock four. In the afternoon a driver rings to say they have been waiting at the gate for an hour, and the gate says they are not on the list. In the evening someone copies all of this into a spreadsheet so that tomorrow everyone knows how many deliveries were handled.
The spreadsheet is a bigger problem here than it looks. It knows nothing about the vehicle already waiting at the gate, the warehouse can’t see it, and two people who open it at the same time will save two different versions of the day.
A shared booking calendar for logistics, the carrier and the warehouse
In TraxSystem, logistics plans the time slots and sets the rules: how long a given type of unloading takes, how much time is needed to get the dock ready and which dock handles which deliveries. The carrier books a slot on its own, in the portal, and sees only the free slots. It enters the driver and vehicle details the day before, so the data comes from whoever actually knows it. The warehouse works from the daily plan instead of phoning the gate.
The warehouse operative confirms the start and end of unloading in the plan. The vehicle’s readiness to leave reaches the gate as information: it doesn’t open the barrier by itself, but the driver no longer has to walk between the hall and the gatehouse with a piece of paper. The warehouse view is limited to its own docks, so the warehouse operative sees only the traffic that concerns them.
The dock dispatcher and automatic closing of no-show bookings
The booking calendar plans the day in advance, and the day rarely goes to plan. The dock dispatcher in TraxSystem moves bookings between docks, sees delays and empty slots, and their decisions are immediately visible to everyone working from the same plan.
Automatic closing of no-show bookings works separately: a booking for which nobody turned up closes by itself after a set time. Without it, after a month the calendar looks full while the docks stand empty, and that is the most common reason why a first attempt at bookings, run in a spreadsheet, stops working.
What TraxSystem won’t solve in the warehouse
TraxSystem won’t add docks. If the site physically can’t take that many deliveries, bookings will spread them out over the day and show how many slots are missing. That information is often the most valuable result of the first quarter, even though it won’t replace a new dock.
Nor will the system plan the work of people in the warehouse. It shows what is coming and when, while shift staffing, task allocation and picking order are managed by the warehouse.
TraxSystem is not a warehouse management system: it does not manage stock levels, storage locations or picking. It handles the point where the warehouse meets vehicle traffic and sits well alongside the warehouse management system already running at the site. Carrier punctuality remains a matter for the contract, because booking a slot is a commercial commitment.
Related
Delivery booking and time slotsCarrier portalsVehicle entry controlReports
Further reading: Lorry queues at the gate · How to organise dock time slots · Who should plan the docks · No-show bookings block the dock