By Jennifer Maselli

Oct. 20, 2003 -- NYK Logistics, based in Secaucus, N.J., had a big parking problem. The company manages the shipment and distribution of a high volume of products, including garments and accessories, consumer and industrial goods, computer software, food and beverages and natural resources for Global

NYK's Pople

1000 companies. But NYK's yard-management system was no match for the more than 50,000 inbound ocean freight containers and 30,000 outbound trailers passing through the gates of its Long Beach, Calif., distribution center annually.

Several months ago, the company implemented a real-time locating system (RTLS) at the Long Beach facility that uses battery-powered RFID tags to track the location of assets in the yard. Now NYK knows exactly where each trailer and is parked and can locate containers to within 10 feet. The system has cut costs and increased operational efficiency in numerous ways, including slashing the average turn time—how long a trailer stays in its yard—by 20 to 40 percent.

NYK's old yard-management system at the Long Beach facility relied on people to track containers and trailers manually, and to coordinate the seven hostler tractors used to move containers around its 70-acre yard. But the manual system lent itself to a number of problems, and as volume in the yard grew, the problems were compounded. For example, NYK employees used to manually enter information about when a truck arrived at the yard, what it was carrying and where it would drop its load. But once the driver left the main gate to drop his cargo off and pick up his next shipment, snafus were common. Often, the designated parking spot was filled, forcing the driver to park in a different spot. Employees at the main gate would have no way of knowing where the truck was. The problems rippled through the yard as subsequent drivers found their spots taken for the day.