Yard & Trailer Management: Trailer Inventory, Dwell Times, Yard Slots, Shunter Moves, Drop-Trailer Pools & Detention-Style Charges

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Read a day of gate in and gate out times, count the trailers on the yard at each check time with COUNTIFS, count arrivals in a time window and find the busiest moment of the day.
• Measure how long each trailer has stood on the yard at the snapshot time, sort the trailers into ageing buckets with IFS, compare the average dwell of empty trailers and count the ones that have been forgotten for a week.
• Compare the daily peak count of each yard zone with its slots, work out the utilisation at the weekly peak, count the days above a comfort limit, find the headroom on the busiest day and colour every count above its zone's capacity.
• Turn the planned trailer moves of each shift into workload minutes, size the number of shunters per shift with a productive share, find the weighted average minutes per move and cost the shunter fleet for a day.
• Turn hourly truck arrivals into the gate lanes needed at a target utilisation, count the hours that need extra lanes, measure the lane utilisation with the standard lanes and estimate the waiting time with a simple queue formula.
• Work out the turn time of a trailer on each store lane, size the drop-trailer pool with a spare share, find the tractors needed from their driving hours and cost the trailers you keep beyond one per tractor.
• Measure how long the DC held each carrier's trailer, subtract the carrier's fictional free hours, round the rest up to started days, price them with the carrier's daily rate and add up the charges for one carrier.
• Compare the yard system with a physical walk of all slots, flag each mismatch, measure the accuracy of the yard list, count trailers the system does not know and chart the rising dwell time of the last six weeks.