Danone North America · 13 US plants, mapped from satellite
The Yard Network System, by FreightRoll.
Your yards are the gap in your supply-chain stack. YardFlow fills it.
You already run fluid dynamics for a living. Milk comes in, you turn it into yogurt, kefir, and creamer, and ship it on a clock. The one place your flow still clogs is the yard: paper at the gate, radios in the lot, a driver out of the cab asking where to go.
YardFlow is the Yard Network System, the software layer between your TMS and your WMS. It skims that friction out of every yard, the way you skim fat off milk. At Primo, drop-and-hook turns fell from 48 minutes to 24, unlocking production capacity they never knew existed. Have a hunch we can do the same for you.
- The gapYour TMS runs the road, your WMS runs the building, nothing runs the yards.
- What it doesEZ-Pass at the gate, air-traffic control for trailers. No paper, no radios.
- The proofPrimo: turns 48 to 24 min, and first ever to commit all ~260 sites.
- The payoffHalve the turn and the same docks free real capacity. Even 5 to 10 percent more product on the footprint you own.
Already live at scale · the Primo Brands network
The Yard Network System runs the yards behind these household brands. Live today, rolling to all ~260 sites.
The modeled prize
Proven at Primo, modeled for your 13 US plants
Listen or watch
The whole argument, your way
A 20-minute audio brief on what the yards quietly cost you and the number on the other side of fixing it. Or watch the 9-minute walkthrough of the system in action.
The 11-slide Danone brief. Forward it to people who prefer good old slides.
Take it to your team (PDF)The problem
Every yard "does it their own way." That is not strategy. That is drift.
Walk any two of your plants and you hear the same line: our yard is different.
It is not. Same trucks, same trailers, same moves. What differs is the workaround each site improvised, hardened into a process nobody chose. Legacy YMS only ever reached your biggest plant. The rest run on a guess.
The lost time lives in the gaps. Now multiply it across ~13 plants, each running its own version. YardFlow runs the whole network as one chain.
Why now
The freight cycle is turning. The yards that waste a driver's day will pay for it in spot rates.
The yards never got the upgrade.
For the first time in four years, pricing power is swinging to carriers as capacity tightens and supply and demand pushes rates up. The next spot market will punish shippers whose yards burn a driver's afternoon. 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 drop-and-hook instruction, every trailer your driver hunts down is added cost. When trucks cost this much, that cost counts double. Fix the yards and the capacity you could not see starts to surface, which is more loads out the same doors. For fresh dairy the clock is unforgiving. A reefer your yards lose today is shrink this week.
The Yard Network System
A new layer of your stack, between the TMS and the WMS.
Every yard runs the same three jobs: check the driver in, place the trailer, turn the load. Legacy YMS only ever automated the biggest plant, one site at a time. The Yard Network System runs all three jobs across every site on one standard. We built it back to front. flowDRIVER pulls the paper and radio out of the journey and keeps the driver in the truck. The operator console is a modern YMS, not an 80s system you wrestle with. flowGATE reads the truck at the gate and updates the console on its own. Think EZ-Pass at the gate and air-traffic control for your trailers. Four jobs: kill the paper, end the driver-to-employee handoff, keep the driver in the truck, cut the turn.
flowDRIVERflowDRIVER
The driver journey, standardized at every plant. No paper, no radio, no app to install.
Open live
flowGATEflowGATE
Cameras read the truck and chassis at the gate and update the YMS. No human in the loop.
Open live
flowTWINOperator console
Every trailer on one live map. The modern YMS the gate and the driver journey both feed.
Open liveThe proof · already at scale
No company had ever put its whole yard network on one system. Primo just did.
Primo Brands committed all ~260 of its sites to the Yard Network System. That has never happened before: a national network standardizing every yard on one protocol instead of one flagship at a time. Live at 24 sites today, rolling to the rest. Where it runs, drop-and-hook turns fell from 48 minutes to 24, and Primo took on more volume on flat dock-office headcount. Danone would be the first fresh-dairy network to do it.
“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.”
Figures from the YardFlow deck and the live network. 24 sites live today, rolling out across the ~260-site commitment.
Sized conservatively, on purpose
We sized it at one fifth of the gain Primo measured. The rest is upside.
Primo measured the full gain. We booked only 20 percent of it, at a conservative $2,500-a-load dairy margin, and counted nothing for the plants that do not yet run drop yards. The headline number is the floor, not the ceiling.
Every figure is the YardFlow ROI engine output, the same one /demo/dannon renders, not a slide number. The paper-only row in the table below is the conservative floor.
| Scenario | Payback | Monthly IRR |
|---|---|---|
| Paper-only savings | 21.4 mo | 2.05% |
| Hard savings | 7.5 mo | 21.67% |
| Full modeled value | 3.2 mo | 138.67% |
Monthly IRR from the YardFlow ROI model: monthly cash flows net of subscription, 24-month horizon. The paper-only scenario is the conservative floor.
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.
- Week 0Network audit from satellite. No IT lift.
- Weeks 1-2One plant live. One TMS read, one WMS write.
- Day 60First measured turn-time win, on your dock.
- ThenStandardize across the 13, on proven economics.
Your own audit
This is Danone's own audit, not a generic benchmark. We mapped 13 plants from satellite. Here is what the handoffs cost today, and where the standard lands first.
- 8 of 13
- Already run drop yardswhere the 48 to 24 minute drop-and-hook win lands
- 8 of 13
- Gated with a guard or boothflowGATE automates the check-in step
- 6 of 13
- Long entry drives where queues buildpre-arrival check-in keeps the queue off the road
See all 13 sitesOpen the audit →Easy
Start at one plant. Take out the paper first. Measure the turn.
Nothing gets ripped out to start. Pick one plant, pull the paper and radios out of the driver journey, and measure the turn in 30 to 60 days. Then the same standard rolls to the 13, on economics a legacy YMS never allowed. As the work automates, your people move up to roles you will need to fill anyway.
A problem you already own, a fix proven at Primo, a prize modeled at $48.6M a year, and a first step that risks nothing. That is the brief.
The 11-slide Danone brief. Forward it to people who prefer good old slides.