Chilled and perishable
Door-open time, correct sequence and the state of the packaging in the cold room.
Ruby Neural
The lorry has been on the bay for forty minutes.
How long each operation takes, which one gets stuck and why.
Bay time lives in somebody's head.
You know which lorries have come and what they brought. How long each one was stood there, which one got stuck and why, that is known by the bay supervisor. And only until Thursday.
It is a figure that matters a great deal: waiting time is paid on it, slots are planned on it and penalties are argued with hauliers on it.
And it is one of the few almost nobody has, because measuring it by hand means somebody writing things down for four hours per lorry.
Four moments per operation.
Arrival, start of unloading, finish and departure. With those four moments, measured from the camera, a feeling becomes a series you can compare.
And with the series the patterns appear: which dock is slower, which haulier takes longer, at what hour the bottleneck forms.
Nobody has to write anything down. The figure generates itself and gets sent to the system already in use.
What it measures.
- Dock occupancy: free, with a lorry, in operation.
- The time of each phase, by dock and by operation.
- Lorries waiting outside and the queue at the entrance.
- Manoeuvring: how long a lorry takes to get into position.
- Items in and out, counted on the bay itself.
- THE STATE OF THE PACKAGING on loading and unloading: torn, wet, crushed.
- A dated image of every finished load, as proof of how it went out.
- Full load verification: whether everything that should have gone on has gone on.
Lo que Ruby Neural entiende
4 detecciones grabadas.
Logística, carga y almacén.
Ruby
Ruby
Ruby
Ruby
Cada una es una grabación del sistema funcionando. Pasa el ratón por encima —o tabula hasta ella— para verla en movimiento.
A real case.
A distribution platform with six docks had an average time of 52 minutes per operation. The feeling was that docks 5 and 6, the ones at the far end, were slower.
The measurement said otherwise: they were the same. What was slow was the 6:00 to 8:00 shift on every dock, because there was only one forklift driver. The 52 minutes were 71 first thing and 44 the rest of the day.
Where it is used.
Parcels
Items per operation, dropped items and full load verification.
Chemicals and hazardous goods
Procedure compliance: chocking, protective equipment and sequence.
Automotive
Load sequencing and verification that what goes out is what should, in the order it should.
Logistics platforms
Times per dock, entry queues and occupancy across the day.
Factories
Dispatch bays and raw material receiving bays.
Retail
Store replenishment within restricted hours.
Ports and terminals
Manoeuvring, positioning and operation time.
And the wear that nobody accounts for.
A bay that works in a hurry wears out more than it looks: the forklift hits the frame, the pallet gets leant where it should not, the door closes with the lorry still moving. Each of those is small and none of them gets written down.
Over the year, the bay's maintenance spend — dock shelters, buffers, doors, floor — comes from there. And because it is not tied to the operation, it gets taken as a fixed cost.
By recording the knocks and the rough manoeuvres, the pattern appears: it is almost always the same docks and the same time slots, which tend to be the ones in most of a hurry.
Sustainability, without the frills.
A lorry waiting with the engine running burns fuel and emits. On a platform with eighty operations a day, avoidable waiting turns into a figure that nobody has today and that more and more customers ask for.
With the times measured you can work out total waiting time and how it moves. It is not a promise of a reduction: it is an indicator that did not exist before and that you can put in a report without making it up.
What usually surprises people about the figure.
Almost every platform thinks it knows which is its slow dock. When it gets measured, the answer is usually another one: there is no slow dock, there are slow time slots and they are the same on every dock.
The second common finding is that operation time itself is not the problem. What takes half the clock is the wait before starting: the lorry in position and nobody free to deal with it.
That changes the decision. You do not buy another bay: you change one person's shift.
How you start.
- One or two docks, not all ten.
- Two weeks measuring, with no alerts and without telling anybody.
- Cross-check with what the bay supervisor says: that is where you see whether the system measures properly.
- After that, extend it and connect it to the transport system.
The state of the packaging, before it goes out.
A pallet that leaves with the film torn or a corner caved in arrives broken. And it arrives with a complaint behind it in which nobody can prove anything, because the only photo there is is the customer's on receiving it.
By checking the packaging at the moment of loading, the problem shows while it can still be fixed: the lorry is still on the bay and the pallet can be re-wrapped or swapped.
And a dated image is kept of every finished load. That turns a complaint of 'it left your place in that state' into a conversation with figures.
Verifying that everything has been loaded.
An incomplete load is the expensive mistake in logistics: it gets found at the destination, forces an extra delivery and eats the margin on the whole order.
By counting items on the bay itself and comparing that with the delivery note, the mismatch shows before the door closes. It is not a new check: it is the one already done, done without anybody having to count.
Speed, and what forcing it costs.
Bringing the average operation time down is the obvious aim, and also the quickest way to break things: loading faster means more knocks, more wear on machinery and more tired people.
With the figure broken down by phase you see where the real margin is. It is almost never in unloading faster: it is in the wait before starting and in the manoeuvring.
And the history lets you compare by haulier, by dock and by hour, which is what you need to negotiate slots with figures instead of impressions.
Procedure and compliance.
- The lorry chocked before the operation starts.
- The dock shelter in place and the door closed where the procedure requires it.
- An operator present with the protective equipment for the area.
- Correct sequence: no unloading before positioning and chocking.
- The lorry door closed before departure.
Casos grabados
Funcionando, en sitios de verdad.
Gestión inteligente de estanterías en almacén con Infinity Neural
Ruby Neural: Revolucionando la seguridad y eficiencia en muelles de carga
Ruby Neural: Revolucionando el almacenaje inteligente de materiales a granel .
What it does not do.
It does not know what the lorry is carrying. It measures times and movements: the delivery note comes from the transport system.
And it needs to see the whole dock. If the camera only takes in the door, you lose the manoeuvring, which is usually half the time.
And what sits alongside it.
Other things the same family understands, on the same cameras.
What people ask us.
▸Do we have to replace the cameras we already have?
Almost never all of them, and sometimes none. What decides it is not the brand or the megapixels: it is the angle, the distance and the light. A modest camera well placed works better than a good one looking from the wrong spot.
The first thing we ask for is an image from the camera exactly as it is. With that you can see whether it works, whether it has to be moved or whether another one is needed. And if another one is needed, we say so then and not after signing.
▸Where is the video processed?
Wherever it needs to be. It can be on a machine on your own site, with the image never leaving it, or on a server. On sites where the video cannot leave for reasons of policy or regulation, it is processed inside, full stop.
What goes out in that case is not image: it is the alerts and the figures.
▸And data protection?
None of this identifies people. It tells apart figures, postures, objects and vehicles, not faces or names.
Even so, a system that processes images of a workplace has its obligations: informing people, defining what it is used for and how long things are kept. That gets sorted at the start, with whoever handles data protection at the company, and it is not paperwork left to the end.
▸Does it work with a dock shelter?
Yes, though it changes what can be seen. With a shelter you cannot see inside the lorry, so the phases are measured from the position of the vehicle, the movement in the transfer area and the opening of the dock door.
You lose the check on the state of the goods inside the lorry; for that you need a camera inside the bay or in the palletising area itself.
▸And at night?
The bay is usually lit because people work there. Where it is not — an outdoor yard, a manoeuvring area — you need a camera with good night performance or infrared lighting, and that gets sized at the start.
▸Can it be integrated with the transport system?
Yes, and that is what gives it value: the measured times go into the TMS alongside the delivery note and the haulier. Without that link, the figure stays in a report that gets looked at once.
The integration is done by API or through the file the system already reads.
▸Does it detect an operation done outside the procedure?
The parts that can be seen, yes: a lorry not chocked, an operation started before positioning, staff without protective equipment in the area, a door open while the vehicle is moving.
That is not watching the staff: it is making the procedure real and not just something in the manual. And when there is an incident, there is a record of how it was done.
▸How long are the loading images kept?
As long as company policy and the applicable regulations say. For complaints, thirty to ninety days is usual, which is the window they arrive in.
What gets kept long term is not the video: it is the still image of each finished load, which takes up almost nothing.
▸How does it know when unloading starts?
From what it sees: the lorry in position, the door open and goods moving. Each of those moments is marked on the image when it is set up.
If the dock has a shelter and the inside cannot be seen, it is measured from the lorry's position and the movement in the transfer area.
▸Is it any use for claiming demurrage?
It gives you the record with the time and the video, which is more than there usually is. What you can claim with that depends on the contract, not on us.
▸And for damaged goods claims?
That is one of the most requested uses, and it works the opposite way round to how it looks: it is not about catching anybody out, it is about being able to show how the goods went out.
A dated image of the state of the packaging is kept for every finished load. When a complaint comes in about a broken pallet, there is a photo of that pallet going onto the lorry. The argument goes from one opinion against another to a figure.
And it also spots the problem before it goes out: if the packaging is already torn at loading, the alert arrives while the lorry is still on the bay.
▸Does it tell the lorry's number plate?
That is another matter and it has other rules. To measure times you do not need to identify the vehicle, and that is why it is not done.
If the time has to be tied to a particular haulier, it is cross-referenced with the entry log the site already keeps.
▸How many docks does one camera cover?
One or two reliably. A camera taking in six sees the whole bay but does not tell properly what is happening at each one.
Get started
Do you want this on your site?
This is already recorded working. What is left is to see whether your camera allows it: where it is fitted, what angle it has and what can be seen from there. If it will not work, we will tell you.