Caterpillar · 21 NA plants, mapped from satellite
The Yard Network System, by FreightRoll.
You broke your sales record. The yards decide how much of that backlog ships.
Q1 2026 came in at $17.4 billion, up 22%, on a record backlog and Power and Energy demand pulling iron out the door. A record backlog is only revenue once a truck clears the gate. Your own analysts name logistics capacity as the bottleneck that can offset the volume. The one place your flow still clogs is the yards. The truck meets the gate, the clock starts, and nothing upstream can see it. Decatur alone is 360 acres of final assembly, and nine buildings can swallow that answer. Trucks take too long to get in and out of your yards. That is money, and it is production capacity you never get to sell.
YardFlow is the Yard Network System, the software layer between your TMS and your WMS. A record backlog only converts as fast as the yards can turn the trucks that carry it. Primo Brands has implemented the driver journey system wide, cut trailer turn times by 50%, and shipped about 5% more volume on the same dock-office headcount. The audit shows where the same gain sits in your network.
- The gapYour TMS runs the road, your WMS runs the building, nothing runs the yards.
- What we doOne digital standard for all sites. EZ-Pass at the gate, air-traffic control for the trailers.
- The proofPrimo: about 5% more volume on flat headcount, turns cut 48 to 24, and 100% of the network committed.
- The payoffReduce turn times, gain 5% capacity per location. Eliminate paper and detention expenses. No change to headcount.
Already live at scale · the Primo Brands network
The Yard Network System runs the yards behind these household brands. Live today, rolling to 100% of the network.
Using actual results from Primo Brands, we modeled the potential prize for Caterpillar.
Proven at Primo, modeled across the network
The problem
Every yard "does it their own way." That is not strategy. That is drift.
Ask two of your plants and we would expect the same line: our yards are different.
In our experience they are not. Same trucks, same trailers, same moves. What differs is the workaround each site improvised, hardened into a process nobody chose. Heavy equipment makes it worse. The machines leaving Decatur do not fit a 53-foot van, so a driver climbs down to ask where his oversized load goes. Across the 21 NA plants we mapped, we count 628 dock doors and 1,340 trailer positions. We cannot see from orbit what runs them. A record backlog raises the truck count at every gate. The slowest yard caps how fast that backlog ships. Legacy YMS was built to run one site, not a network. Our read is that the gap shows up everywhere except your biggest plant.
Why now
A record backlog and a record quarter. The yards decide how fast you turn it into shipped iron.
Q1 2026 sales hit $17.4 billion, up 22%, on a record backlog, with Power and Energy alone near $7.0 billion.
Your own read names logistics capacity as a bottleneck that can offset the volume. You also committed $725 million to expand the Lafayette engine campus, the largest single plant investment in your history. A new line ships nothing if the yard cannot turn the trucks that carry it. Your yards are the cap on what your plants can sell. The yards never got the upgrade. You already track in-transit inventory with sensors and cut over $250 million in stock that way. The yard is the one place that visibility still goes dark. Detention starts at hour two and runs $50 to $100 an hour, and carriers now pick their shippers. Every printed BOL, every forced check-in, every flatbed your driver hunts down is added cost. Fix the yards and the capacity you could not see starts to surface, which is more machines out the same gates. Your dealers are waiting on that iron. A flatbed your yard loses today is a delivery a dealer slips this week.
The Yard Network System
A new layer of your stack, between the TMS and the WMS.
Every yard runs the same jobs, and the same people run them. The Yard Network System gives each of them one standard across every site. The driver checks in from their phone with flowDRIVER. The spotter moves the trailer while a cab camera maps the yard with flowTWIN. The dock coordinator assigns the door from flowYMS. The dock office signs the BOL with flowBOL. The executive watches every yard on flowNETWORK. Under all of it, machine vision reads the truck at the gate and an agent dispatches the next move. Think EZ-Pass at the gate and air-traffic control for your trailers.
The proof · already at scale
No company had ever put its whole yard network on one system. Primo just did.
The point is not faster trucks. It is realized production capacity: 5% more volume out the door on the same headcount, capacity those plants could not ship before.
Primo started with one layer: the driver journey. Text the truck instead of checking it in. Paper out of the gate. No more driver-to-dock-office handoff. Across the 24 sites where it went live, those yards shipped about 5% more volume than the sites without it, on the same dock-office headcount. That alone is why Primo committed all ~260 sites to the full Yard Network System, the first national shipper to standardize every yard on one protocol. The YMS is rolling now. Live at 10 plants, every production site by the end of Q3. The highest-volume campus is going fully automated end to end, on a trailer map that updates itself in real time. The 5% came from the lightest touch. The rest is still ahead. Caterpillar would be the first heavy-equipment network to put its whole yard footprint on one protocol.
“Your software enabled us to take on additional volume while remaining headcount neutral in the dock office. That was an integral part of our strategy, and it has been proven.”
Result measured on the driver-journey layer, before the YMS rollout. Primo is live at 10 plants today, every production site by the end of Q3.
What it touches
A new layer, not a new migration.
YardFlow runs in the yard and talks to the systems you already have. Your TMS and WMS stay the systems of record. Nobody is ripping anything out.
Built for enterprise infosec review. We connect over your standard API or EDI and scope to yard operations, not your ERP of record. Full integration and security review happen in the audit.
- In the yardflowDRIVER (driver app, no install) and flowGATE (camera gate) run on YardFlow. Nothing changes on the plant floor.
- ReadsYour TMS appointments, over standard API or EDI.
- WritesGate and turn events back to your WMS, so dock and inventory stay current.
- IT liftOne connection per system. No rip-and-replace, no platform migration.
Your own audit
This is Caterpillar's own audit, not a generic benchmark. We mapped 21 NA plants from satellite. Here is what the handoffs cost today, and where the standard lands first.
- 17 of 19
- Already run drop yardswhere the 48 to 24 minute drop-and-hook win lands
- 19 of 19
- Gated with a guard or boothflowGATE automates the check-in step
- 17 of 19
- Long entry drives where queues buildpre-arrival check-in keeps the queue off the road
See all 19 sitesOpen the audit →We are not asking for a pilot. We are asking for a conversation.
A 30-minute call, direct with Casey. We show you what we found on your network, you tell us straight where it fits. We will not tell you which site to start at. We have only seen your yards from orbit. You run them, so you already know which one goes first. If the call goes well, we talk about where that is. If the call does not land, you keep the analysis.
None of these times work? Email me at casey@freightroll.com or call or text me at 410-236-7434, and we’ll find one.
Casey Larkin, YardFlow. Jake, our founder, joins when it helps.
