You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See: Data-Driven Productivity Insights

“Where’s the vehicle?”

In any vehicle yard in the post-assembly finished vehicle supply chain, this is the question on which yard drivers and management have become fixated.

Drivers focus on it so they can readily locate the right vehicle and take it to where it’s supposed to go next — a marshaling point for shipment to a dealer, or to accessorization, customization, or repair stations. Yard managers care about it because time spent hunting for misplaced vehicles saps yard productivity and even leads to incomplete shipments.

Increasingly, vehicle yards are investing in location intelligence to provide real-time visibility into their vehicles’ location and movement.

Leveraging low-cost wireless GPS-enabled tracker tags, location intelligence systems provide a simple-to-use, real-time alternative to RFID, GPS scanners, and manual entry of a target vehicle’s location. The resulting productivity improvements — and cost savings — can be substantial. But potentially even greater productivity improvements come from analyzing the vehicle movement data that is the foundation of that real-time location intelligence.

Filling the data vacuum in finished vehicle logistics

As vehicles are moved, a wealth of information is captured about each movement. Data that can subsequently be analyzed and used to create efficiencies.

• To which drivers were the movements assigned?
• At what exact time?
• Were the correct vehicles successfully located and moved?
• How far were vehicles moved?
• When was vehicle movement logged as complete? When did the driver exit the vehicle?
• Were vehicles moved to the correct location?
• When were the drivers assigned their next vehicle movements?

Armed with basic data like this, covering every vehicle movement, on every shift, by every driver employed in the yard, a wealth of productivity-boosting insights can be generated. Insights that yard managers would benefit from having but lack the tools to generate.

User configurable data

What sort of insights are available?

Yard management has a high degree of control over the metrics that can be produced with the right location intelligence system: the raw data is there, but how it is reported should be easily configurable.

With a tool such as Cognosos’ real-time location intelligence solution, for instance, additional data can be added to provide useful context. Yards can be divided up into geo-fenced zones, shift patterns can be associated with movement times, and yard management could even add weather and temperature data.

What metrics might yard managers want to study?  Consider these, to start with:

• Average move time per vehicle per driver
• Wait time between moves
• Accuracy in moving the correct vehicle to the correct location
• Damage reporting by vehicle by driver
• Time to stage and load vehicles for truck- or rail-out
• Percent of outbound loads that are incomplete (i.e., missing one or more vehicles)
• Driver utilization (including time for breaks)

Scoreboards can even be created to further drive productivity.

KPIs such as these allow management to drill down and see comparisons between shifts or between drivers, and use that information to create efficiencies — and potential savings. It’s data that uniquely stems from Cognosos’ ability to deliver real-time location intelligence. Tools that take a “point-in-time” approach to vehicle location lack the ability to track moves between vehicle locations. As such, insights into movement efficiencies and productivity are a data black hole.

Data your way

In the case of the Cognosos real-time location intelligence system, yard managers can get the data in the way that works best for their organization: a built-in Cognosos dashboard or by utilizing our REST API — a data interface that can connect to your own systems and devices, allowing you to incorporate other contextual data as well. Connect the Cognosos API to your ERP system, yard management system, or central dashboard system, and view yards’ productivity metrics on users’ smartphones, tablets, laptops, or desktop devices. The possibilities are almost endless.

Cognosos’ real-time location intelligence technology provides vehicle yards with not one compelling source of ROI, but two: best-in-class real-time vehicle location intelligence, and the data-driven insights to drive productivity even higher.

If you want to learn more about how real-time vehicle visibility can support advanced tracking for finished vehicle logistics, download our guide, “The Alignment Advantage: How to Improve FVL Efficiency and Profitability.“