Four records, numbered spots and one rule about who moves what. What a YMS automates, and what you can do before you buy one.
Key takeaways
You manage a yard without a yard management system by making four records authoritative and refusing to work around them: a trailer register, a numbered spot map, a gate log and a seal log. A YMS automates those four records and adds live positions; a forty-trailer site can hold them in a shared spreadsheet and a whiteboard, provided one person owns them and every move updates them.
The failure mode at a small site is never the absence of software. It is that three people each know where some of the trailers are, and none of them knows which of the empties is actually loaded.
Yard time is regulated time. The federal Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations count as on-duty time both the time a driver spends waiting before and while a vehicle is serviced, loaded, unloaded or dispatched, and the time spent performing yard moves within a terminal, depot or port that is not on a public road. A shunt driver moving trailers around your property is on duty for every minute of it.
That matters because the same regulations cap a day at 13 hours of driving time and 14 hours of on-duty time, and require at least 10 hours of off-duty time in a day, including at least 2 hours that do not form part of the mandatory 8 consecutive hours. Time lost hunting for trailer 4127 is not slack; it is capacity you have already paid for.
There is a narrower record-keeping route for genuinely local operations. Where a driver is instructed to operate within a radius of 160 km of the home terminal and returns there each day to begin at least 8 consecutive hours off duty, the carrier may keep accurate and legible records showing the cycle followed and on-duty times for each day, kept with their supporting documents for a minimum of six months, instead of a full record of duty status. That is a lighter record, not an absent one — and it is exactly the kind of record a yard log can produce as a by-product.
The trailer register. One row per trailer on site: number, owner, arrived (date and time), status (loaded, empty, loading, out of service), contents reference, seal number, and the outbound load it is committed to. The two columns people leave out are the ones that cause the calls — who owns it, and what it is committed to.
The spot map. Number every parking position, paint the numbers where a driver can read them from the cab, and never use relative descriptions. “Behind the blue building” is not a location; D7 is. If you have doors and a lot, number the doors in the same scheme so a move is always from one identifier to another.
The gate log. Every arrival and departure: time, tractor, trailer, driver name, carrier, seal number in and out, and who authorised the release. This is the record that answers a cargo claim, and it is the record that a fraud attempt has to defeat.
The seal log. Seal numbers applied, by whom, and against which load. A seal is only evidence if you can show it was intact at handover and who put it on.
Write three rules and post them. Only a named shunt driver moves trailers. No trailer moves without the register being updated in the same action. No loaded trailer leaves without a check that the outbound paperwork and the seal number agree. Everything else is detail.
Traffic in a yard is a safety programme, not a convenience. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety recommends creating a written traffic management plan and conducting a hazard assessment, taking account of the flow of forklift and pedestrian traffic, braking distance when carrying a load, visibility where the mast, load or stacked goods obstruct the operator’s view, and overhead and side clearances at loading docks, transfer areas, aisles, doorways and ramps.
At the trailer itself, CCOHS sets out the preparation steps before loading or unloading: make sure the transport vehicle’s brakes are engaged, ask the driver to turn off the motor, chock the wheels, engage a trailer restraint system if one is available, park a flatbed on level ground free of debris and depressions, instruct the driver to stay clear of the area while the forklift is in motion, and make sure the trailer’s landing gear or stabiliser is fully supporting it if it is not coupled to a tractor. Those steps also belong in your yard rules, because at a small site the yard person and the dock person are often the same person.
Two record sets already exist in law and can be folded into the same system rather than kept separately. Under the National Safety Code, maintained by the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, the 16 standards include Maintenance and Periodic Inspection (Standard 11), Trip Inspection (Standard 13) and Carrier and Driver Profiles (Standard 7), and all provinces and territories use the Code as the cornerstone of their commercial vehicle framework.
The provincial expression of that is concrete. In British Columbia, the Motor Vehicle Act Regulations require the owner of every vehicle to maintain in safe keeping, during the last three years of ownership and for six months after disposal, a record of each inspection made of the vehicle and of every component to which the standards apply, and of every replacement and repair made following each inspection. If your yard log already records which trailer went where and when, adding the inspection and repair record to the same row costs nothing.
A trailer holding dangerous goods parked in your yard is still in transport. Anyone who handles or offers it for transport must be adequately trained and hold a training certificate, or work in the presence and under the direct supervision of someone who does — and an employer must not direct or allow an untrained employee to do that work. The shipping document must also stay with the shipment and carry the consignor’s Canadian place of business, the date it was prepared or first given to a carrier, and each dangerous good described in the prescribed order starting with the UN number and shipping name.
Worked example: a Winnipeg 3PL with 40 trailers and 18 spots
The site runs 18 marked spots and routinely holds nearer 40 trailers, so the overflow parks along the fence line. Two shunt drivers work opposite shifts and hand over by text message. Twice in a month a carrier arrived for a pre-booked pickup and left empty because nobody could find the trailer.
The fix took a morning and no software. Every position along the fence was numbered F1 to F24 and stencilled on the pavement. The spreadsheet gained three columns: owner, committed outbound load, and seal number. The handover moved from text messages to a single shared sheet with a timestamped last-updated cell, and a rule that a move is not finished until the sheet says so.
The measurable result was not a productivity statistic — the site never had a baseline — but the failed-pickup calls stopped, and the shunt drivers stopped starting each shift with a lap of the yard. The site later bought a yard management system; the reason it went in cleanly was that the numbering scheme and the register already existed to load into it.
Three signals, in the order they usually appear. First, two people need to update the register at the same time and one of them starts keeping a private copy. Second, you need history — how long did that trailer actually sit — and the sheet only holds current state. Third, you start being asked for a live view by a customer, at which point emailing a spreadsheet is no longer an answer.
Until then, spend the money on paint and numbering rather than on licences. A yard management system imposes a discipline; if you do not have the discipline, the system inherits the confusion and adds a subscription.
The tasks worth automating at a small yard are reading inbound documents so the register is populated before the trailer arrives, matching seal numbers between the gate log and the outbound paperwork, and raising an exception when a trailer has sat past a threshold or has no committed outbound load. Those are extraction, matching and alerting — a tool prepares the list and drafts the note; the yard supervisor decides what moves.
Yes. The regulations expressly include performing yard moves of a commercial vehicle within a terminal, depot or port and not on a public road within on-duty time.
Longer than you think. Business records generally have to be kept for six years from the end of the last taxation year to which they relate under the Income Tax Act, and the yard log is often the only contemporaneous evidence in a cargo claim. Keep it with the load file.
CCOHS recommends a written traffic management plan supported by a hazard assessment as the way to manage forklift and pedestrian traffic. Your provincial occupational health and safety regulator sets the binding requirement, so check it locally — but a two-page plan at a small site is not an unreasonable ask.
Eventually. In the meantime, make sure the trailer number is written identically in both, because most small-site integration problems turn out to be formatting differences in an identifier. Our note on dispatch software for trucking companies covers what to look for.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you what to fix first.
