Aviro360 targets dwell time with automated yard inventory

Another use case was tackling dwell. For those unfamiliar, dwell time is another opaque yet endemic blight that feeds upon supply chain efficiency. In 2023, drivers were detained on 39.3% of all stops. That detention cost for-hire trucking firms $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity, according to the American Transportation Research Institute. 

Additionally, getting paid for dwell is a feat in and of itself. Fleets bill for those events on 94.5% of occasions and collect on fewer than half the invoices. Aviro360 estimated the return at more than $650,000 per year, per site, during an appearance on the Let’s Talk Supply Chain podcast.

Ending Yard Blindness

Kolko likened the yard as the last unautomated link in a supply chain that got modernized around it.

“All this progress on the transport side, all this progress inside the warehouse through robotics, on the transport side all the track-and-trace related improvements, I think now it’s time to handle the yard,” Kolko said in an interview with FreightWaves. “And now it’s right in between there as well, causing all these challenges.”

He describes the failure as sitting upstream of the software used to measure it.

“Someone went out there to take inventory of the yard, didn’t come back for four hours, and when they came back with a pen and paper it’s 75% accurate,” Kolko said. “It’s almost always 75% accurate, by the way, when it’s done manually.”

That number is the ceiling on which sits every decision made downstream of it, because a spotter dispatched against a bad location burns a move and a driver’s clock at the same time. Aviro360 captures chassis and container numbers, license plates, and logos at the gate on both the inbound and the outbound side, then tracks each asset through the yard onto a single timeline. That includes which door it hit, which spot it parked in, and when each move happened. Outbound gets  as much engineering attention as inbound, because the gate is also where assets leave attached to trucks that do not own them.

Where Latency Turns Into Spoilage

Another example is in the reefer segment where data latency becomes loss. Aviro360 integrates with trailer telematics and flags units aging past their window before the load becomes scrap. It’s an area where detention is also more prevalent.  ATRI puts refrigerated drivers at the top of the detention table at 56.2% of stops. That capability is what recently won the company food and beverage customers, Kolko said.

“You can invest in a YMS, TMS, ERP, any kind of system of record, there is great software out there, we integrate with all of them,” Kolko said. “But if that critical data input from the yard, the actual physical site, is lacking, then your true physical workloads take the hit.”

Automated Yard Inventory in Two or Three Days

The hardware is proprietary and shrinking in size as technology because cheaper and more compact. Aviro360 cut its gate footprint by 40% over the past 18 months, meaning fewer cameras, fewer poles, and less steel in the ground. Gate installs run two or three days on a ready site, with a soft launch by day five. The mobile inventory units, which mount to yard hustlers or any other vehicle already touring the site, go in the same day.

Then comes a four-week calibration window while the machine learning models learn the property. Nothing on the ground has to be marked for it to work.

“For the mobile inventory unit, you don’t need to have your parking spots marked. We don’t even need to see the door,” Kolko said. “The moment we anchor ourselves to a particular geolocation, we can recognize any spot anywhere and show that within our digital twin.”

Accuracy reaches 99% at the end of the fourth week, Kolko said. The company also runs a competitive check against cameras a customer already owns and reuses what passes, along with gate arms and chain-link gates, which matters at sites where procurement just signed off on a security system and has no appetite for a second one.

Whoever Runs the Yard, the Integration Path Is the Same

Yard labor at large shippers splits unpredictably between in-house spotters and outsourced 3PL or carrier crews, and Kolko puts the mix at roughly 50/50 across the customer base. The split matters to anyone selling into the yard, because the buyer, the crew turning the wheels, and the system of record are frequently three different companies. One customer runs 24 distribution centers on its own systems. Another hands the same work entirely to third parties.

“To us, as long as the integration path is shown to us, we’re really agnostic to who is managing it or on what terms,” Kolko said. “We’re used to handling all these personas.”

Yard Inventory Automation Becomes Table Stakes

The concept has been in development for more than a decade, and both core products are in their third generation. What changed recently is the price. Yard-grade computer vision used to be a million-dollar custom build reserved for marine terminals, and productizing it moved the technology into reach of ordinary distribution centers.

Kolko expects gate automation and inventory reconciliation to become table stakes within five years, with yard intelligence as the layer that follows. The near-term driver is what the competition already installed.

“Everyone is coming to the realization that I can fix a lot of the problems that I have in the yard and it’s not going to cost me a fortune, and my competition is doing it,” Kolko said. “So I think within the next 18 months we’re going to see the first phase of modernization of these concepts.”