H-E-B · 16 US sites, mapped from satellite
The Yard Network System, by FreightRoll.
You are pouring $636M into the San Antonio hub. The yards are the last layer without a standard.
In May 2026 Bexar County cleared a tax break for your $636M expansion of the San Antonio Super Regional Center, adding a bakery plant, a refrigerated warehouse, and a returned-goods center to a campus that already moves a million square feet. Every one of those buildings ships through a yard. You are vertically integrated in a way almost no grocer is, with your own milk plants and bakeries and a dense DC network that feeds the Texas store base from a footprint you own end to end. You already treat the yard as a checkpoint. The one place your flow still clogs is the yard. The truck meets the gate, the clock starts, and nothing upstream can see it. That is lost time, and it is shelf capacity you never get to move.
YardFlow is the Yard Network System, the software layer between your TMS and your WMS. It turns those manual gate stops into one orchestrated gate-to-dock flow across the whole network. 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 site. 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 H-E-B.
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 sites 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. A San Antonio RSC, a Houston milk and bread plant, and a Weslaco RSC each run check-in their own way. Across the 16 sites we mapped, we count 832 dock doors and almost 1,854 trailer positions. We cannot see from orbit what runs them. The San Antonio expansion adds a bakery, a reefer warehouse, and a returns center, and each one inherits that same manual gate. Legacy YMS was built to run one site, not a network. Our read is that the rest are flying blind. You would know better than we would.
Why now
The $636M hub goes in now. The yards that feed it have to carry more.
In May 2026 Bexar County approved the tax break for your $636M San Antonio hub expansion.
It adds a bakery, a refrigerated warehouse, and a returned-goods center to the East Side campus. New DCs are landing for the DFW and Houston metros at the same time. You can spin a building up to move ten percent more. It ships nothing if the yard cannot turn ten percent more trucks. Your yards are the cap on what your stores can stock. The yards never got the upgrade. For the first time in four years, pricing power is swinging to carriers as capacity tightens and rates push 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 trailer a driver hunts down is added cost. Fix the yards and the capacity you could not see starts to surface. For fresh dairy and bakery 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 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. H-E-B already owns its supply chain to the SKU. The next step is putting every yard in that chain 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 inside the DC.
- 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 H-E-B's own audit, not a generic benchmark. We mapped 16 sites from satellite. Here is what the handoffs cost today, and where the standard lands first.
- 9 of 13
- Already run drop yardswhere the 48 to 24 minute drop-and-hook win lands
- 7 of 13
- Gated with a guard or boothflowGATE automates the check-in step
- 8 of 13
- Long entry drives where queues buildpre-arrival check-in keeps the queue off the road
See all 13 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.
