How Poor Yard Visibility Breaks Your Supply Chain Performance

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93% of surveyed logistics professionals use a yard management system, yet 59% still report incomplete yard visibility. Here is how that gap turns into dwell time, detention costs, and where to start closing it.

Key takeaways

• Your warehouse management system (WMS) tracks what’s inside the building, and your transportation management system (TMS) tracks what’s on the road. The yard between them often still runs on people, radios, and periodic walks. 

• One unknown trailer location can set off a chain: late door assignment, missed dock appointment, late shipment, then OTIF penalties. 

• The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) found that drivers were detained at 39.3% of stops in 2023. That cost the industry $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity. 

• In Aviro360’s 2025 research (n=367 U.S. logistics professionals), 93% use a yard management system (YMS) and 59% still report incomplete visibility. 

• You can’t manage dwell or detention you don’t observe. Traditional dwell tracking depends on someone taking inventory and updating a system. 

What is yard visibility? 

Yard visibility means knowing, in near real time, which trailers, containers, and other assets are in your yard. It also means knowing where each one is parked, how long it’s been there, and what happens to it next. It covers three places: the gate (who arrived, and when), the yard (what’s parked where), and the dock (what’s due at which door). 

Yard blindness is the gap between what your systems say about the yard and what’s actually out there. In our research, 57% of respondents reported at least one blind spot. 

The visibility gap 

Of the logistics professionals we surveyed, 93% already use a YMS, and 59% still say they don’t have complete visibility. Among those who recently upgraded their YMS, 54% still report blind spots. 

So, buying software hasn’t closed the gap, and the software isn’t the reason. The WMS covers inventory inside the four walls. The TMS covers the load once it’s on the road. Each system depends on what it’s told and how fast it’s told. In most yards, that information still arrives by hand: a radio call, a clipboard, a spreadsheet updated after someone walks the rows. If the input is an hour old, so is the screen. 

The yard is one of the least-instrumented links in the chain. When something goes wrong there, it usually shows up somewhere else as a missed KPI. 

The symptom chain 

The diagram above shows how one gap travels. Here are the steps: 

1. Unknown trailer location. The record says the trailer is in door 12’s staging lane. It isn’t. 

2. Late door assignment. Someone must find the trailer before it can go to the door. 

3. Missed dock appointment. The carrier shows up on time and waits. Or the load is ready, and the trailer isn’t. 

4. Late shipment. A short delay at the dock turns into a missed delivery window. 

5. OTIF penalties and chargebacks. Retailers measure on-time, in-full performance and fine for misses. SPS Commerce’s summary of Walmart’s program puts the fine at 3% of the cost of goods sold on non-compliant orders. 

By the time the problem reaches the retailer, it looks like a late shipment, and nobody goes back to check the yard. 

The hidden costs 

OTIF fines are the cost people see. The others are harder to spot. 

Detention and demurrage. Detention is typically charged when a driver or piece of equipment is held past agreed free time. Demurrage is typically charged when a container sits at a terminal past its free time. ATRI’s 2023 numbers on detention: 

• Drivers were detained at 39.3% of stops. For refrigerated trailer drivers, it was 56.2%. 

• For-hire trucking lost more than 135 million hours to detention. 

• 94.5% of fleets charge detention fees, but they get paid on fewer than half of those invoices. 

The last number is where the yard comes in. When a carrier bills you for detention and you have no timestamped record of arrival, wait, and departure, you have little to check the claim against. 

Excess trailer pool. If you can’t see which trailers are empty and available, the usual fix is to carry more equipment than you need.

Yard-check labor. A count done by hand is slow, and the yard keeps changing while you count. In FreightWaves coverage (September 2026), Aviro360 President Ilhan Kolko described a manual count of a 6,000-container yard. It took about four hours and was roughly 75% accurate. With the automated system, the same count takes under an hour at 99%, but only after calibration, which takes about four weeks. 

Mis-shipments. When the record and the yard disagree, the wrong trailer can be loaded or released. 

Carrier relationships. ATRI puts driver detention at 117 to 209 hours a year, depending on the sector. Carriers remember which facilities hold them and which don’t. 

Why spreadsheets and radios stop scaling 

Good yard teams use spreadsheets and radios because they work. The trouble is that they can’t keep up once volume grows. 

A record typed by hand starts going stale the moment it’s saved, because trailers keep moving. It leaves no audit trail either, so you can’t tell who changed what or when. Your dwell numbers are only as current as the last walk. At moderate volume, you can live with that. Add more carriers and less slack, and the gap gets wider. 

What good looks like 

• Gate events captured automatically. Every arrival and departure gets a timestamp, and nobody has to type it in. 

• Yard inventory you can trust. You know what’s in the yard, and where, without walking it. 

• Expected vs. actual arrivals. You can see who’s late, who’s early, and who never showed up. 

• Exceptions flagged for you. A trailer that has sat too long or is in the wrong spot gets flagged before anyone goes looking for it. 

Where Aviro360 fits 

Aviro360 is a yard visibility platform. It uses computer vision for gate automation, mobile yard inventory, and security. It runs alongside the TMS, YMS, and WMS your site already has, and those stay your systems of record. Aviro360 is the system of reality: it shows what’s happening in the yard right now. 

Gate installs typically take two to three days, with a soft launch by day five, and they use the cameras and gate arms already on site. Mobile inventory units go live the same day. Expect about four weeks of calibration before the automated counts reach the accuracy numbers above. 

How long would it take your team to find a specific trailer right now? 

Check out our yard visibility self-assessment →

Frequently asked questions 

What is yard visibility? 
Yard visibility is near-real-time knowledge of which assets are in a yard, where each one is, how long it has been there, and what is expected next. 

How does poor yard visibility affect OTIF? 
When a trailer’s location or status is unknown, door assignments and dock appointments slip. That causes late or incomplete shipments, which retail OTIF programs penalize with fines and chargebacks. 

What is the difference between detention and demurrage? 
Detention is typically charged when a driver or equipment is held past free time at a facility. Demurrage is typically charged when a container remains at a terminal past its free time. 

Is a YMS enough to give yard visibility? 
A YMS is an important system of record, and it depends on the quality and timeliness of the data it receives. In Aviro360’s research, 59% of respondents who use a YMS still lack complete visibility. Aviro360 supplies real-time data about what is happening in the yard and works alongside the YMS. 

How long does it take to deploy yard visibility technology? 
Aviro360 gate installs typically take two to three days with a soft launch by day five. Mobile inventory units can go live the same day. Full calibration takes about four weeks.