Sam's Club · 10 US DCs, mapped from satellite
The Yard Network System, by FreightRoll.
You are rebuilding the network around new hubs. The yards are the half that runs uneven.
In 2025 you opened a 1 million square foot DC near the Port of Jacksonville, feeding 25 clubs and four other Southeast DCs, and you are reconfiguring the network around hubs like it. Every new hub pours more inbound trucks into yards that each run their own way. The one place that control goes uneven is the yard. Eight of the ten DCs we mapped gate the truck. Two sit wide open to the road. A truck rolls in and no system knows it arrived until someone walks the lot.
YardFlow is the Yard Network System, the software layer between your TMS and your WMS. As you route port volume through new hubs, one gate-to-dock standard keeps every owned and 3PL yard moving the same way. 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 Sam's Club.
Proven at Primo, modeled across your 10 US DCs
The problem
Every yard "does it their own way." That is not strategy. That is drift.
Ask two of your DCs 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. The new Jacksonville hub pulls port containers and feeds four other Southeast DCs, so one slow yard there backs up trucks down the whole lane. Two of your ten DCs, Hattiesburg and Edwardsville, sit wide open to the road. A truck rolls in, parks, and no system knows it arrived until someone walks the lot. Several of your DCs are run by third parties, Saddle Creek and a Prologis lease, on their tools, not yours. Across the ten we mapped, we count 1,083 dock doors and room for about 2,530 trailers. We cannot see from orbit what runs them. The control is uneven, and you cannot manage what you cannot see.
Why now
You are reconfiguring the network around new hubs. The yards that waste a driver's day will cap how far it scales.
The Jacksonville hub is now live and you are routing more port and club volume through new automated sites.
New capacity ships nothing if the yard cannot turn the trucks that feed it. Your yards are the cap on what your network can move. The newest sites already run open to the road, so the gap grows as you grow. For the first time in four years, pricing power is swinging to carriers as capacity tightens. 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, which is more loads out the same doors. The hubs are coming online. The yards are the unfinished half.
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. Sam's Club would be the first warehouse-club network to put owned and 3PL yards 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 dock 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. The same standard runs on owned and 3PL sites.
Your own audit
This is Sam's Club's own audit, not a generic benchmark. We mapped 10 DCs from satellite. Here is what the handoffs cost today, and where the standard lands first.
- 9 of 10
- Already run drop yardswhere the 48 to 24 minute drop-and-hook win lands
- 8 of 10
- Gated with a guard or boothflowGATE automates the check-in step
- 10 of 10
- Long entry drives where queues buildpre-arrival check-in keeps the queue off the road
See all 10 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.
