Tractor Supply Company · 11 distribution centers, mapped from satellite
The Yard Network System, by FreightRoll.
Your yards are the gap in your supply-chain stack. YardFlow fills it.
You are building distribution center number 11 in Nampa, Idaho right now, an 865,000 square foot hub coming online late 2026, and you self-distribute to every store from these regional DCs. You run them tight. Nine of the 11 gate the truck and seven keep a staffed booth, tighter control than most grocers we map. But every yard sits on open rural land, where trailers stage outside the fence before a single gate, and that check-in pinch is where the network chokes.
YardFlow is the Yard Network System, the software bridge between your TMS and your WMS. You already treat the gate as a checkpoint. We make every trailer legible from that gate to the dock, on one standard across all 11 DCs. At Primo, drop-and-hook turns fell from 48 minutes to 24. The autonomous yard everyone wants is built on exactly this, a yard the system can finally see.
- The gapYour TMS runs the road, your WMS runs the building, nothing runs the yards.
- What we doOne digital standard for all 11 DCs. EZ-Pass at the gate, air-traffic control for the trailers.
- The proofPrimo: about 5% more volume observed at the 24 sites running the driver journey, first ever to commit all ~260 sites.
- The payoffReduce turn times, free dock capacity, eliminate paper and detention. 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 the results Primo measured, we modeled the prize across your 11 DCs.
Proven at Primo, modeled across your 11 DCs
The problem
You gate every yard. The gate is still a manual choke point.
You run tight yards.
Nine of your 11 DCs gate the truck and seven keep a staffed booth. But every DC sits on open rural land, and trailers stage outside the fence before one gate. A guard with a clipboard meters the whole network. The control is real, the data is not.
Why now
You are adding a DC and chasing 100 new stores. The gate decides if it scales.
The Nampa DC opens late 2026 to feed 200-plus Pacific Northwest stores, and you target about 100 new stores in 2026.
Add that volume upstream and it ships nothing if the yards cannot turn that many more trucks. Your yards are the cap on what the network can move. Set the standard before number 11 opens, not after. Pricing power is swinging back to carriers as capacity tightens. The next spot market punishes 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 clipboard check-in at a rural gate is time the driver remembers. The autonomous yard everyone talks about runs on a digital substrate you do not have yet. Build it now and you cut detention today while you lay the groundwork for what comes next.
The Yard Network System
One standard between your TMS and your WMS, at every DC.
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 5% came from the lightest touch. The rest is still ahead. Tractor Supply would be the first farm and ranch retailer to take 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.”
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. Your guards and gates keep working.
- 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 Tractor Supply's own audit, not a generic benchmark. We mapped all 11 DCs from satellite. Here is what the manual gate costs today, and where the standard lands first.
- 10 of 10
- Run drop yardswhere the 48 to 24 minute drop-and-hook win lands
- 9 of 10
- Gated with a guard or boothflowGATE automates the check-in step the booth does by hand
- 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 and where it does not. If the call goes well, we talk pilot. If not, 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.
