Terminal View with TANGO Trace and Go is bringing equipment location tracking down from your RTGs and top-picks and making it available to every piece of equipment in your yard.
It allows terminals to track UTRs and other small truck fleets using economical, off-the-shelf GPS devices. Additionally, terminals can utilize GPS enabled hardware or devices that are already installed within their terminal facility. There’s nothing that can’t be tracked, and when that data is combined within Terminal View, you gain total visibility for your entire operation.
This opens up huge opportunities for efficiency gains. It also allows extra layers of safety monitoring and environmental relief. And when something goes wrong, having the ability to replay the moves of every piece of active yard equipment makes it significantly easier to find out what happened.
This article will explore four use cases that demonstrate the power of TANGO Trace and Go with Terminal View. Each scenario wouldn’t be possible without this groundbreaking Tideworks technology. We’ll start with safety concerns.
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How TANGO Increases Yard Safety
More information always leads to a safer environment. A boiler without a temperature indicator could overheat and become an explosion risk, and no one would know. When you add a backup camera to cars, pedestrians are instantly safer.
Information increases our awareness, which helps us prevent disasters. In this way, TANGO helps increase terminal safety by expanding operators’ ability to see all of its moving parts.
Imagine you’re in the yard, and you discover an unknown fluid leak. You can’t allow vehicles or personnel into the area until staff members ascertain the nature of the leak.
Worse, imagine you find a fire or some other hazardous situation that requires clearing personnel away quickly. With TANGO, you’ll know what equipment is nearby. And if you outfit workers with wearable GPS devices, you’ll be able to account for their whereabouts as well.
You won’t need to radio supervisors or have staff members drive through the terminal looking for people. You’ll know exactly who needs to be contacted to clear the area quickly.
Let’s say you want to keep an area of the terminal cordoned off from equipment. Maybe your restriping or cleaning up from an accident or incident. With TANGO and Terminal View, operators can watch equipment movements in real-time and set up alerts. If a UTR gets too close to a restricted area, the system could notify safety personnel, allowing them to contact the driver before he or she enters harm’s way.
Because TANGO tracks movement over time, you can see how fast equipment is moving. If a particular driver frequently exceeds safe operating speeds, the system can alert you, providing the opportunity for disciplinary action.
Large terminals are complicated systems with hundreds of moving parts. Without visibility, equipment and people can intersect in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways. TANGO keeps a vigilant eye on each piece of equipment, no matter how small, to prevent accidents and keep your terminal safe.
How TANGO Improves Efficiency
If you want to get better at something, you study it. You dissect it, searching for patterns. You look for strategies that work and throw out ones that don’t. You can only improve if you can find and weed out behaviors that don’t help you.
Now imagine trying to get better at chess without studying the movement of the pieces and the interplay between them? Without TANGO, your terminal is a chessboard, and the game is invisible.
With this technology, you’ll learn more about your operation than was ever possible before. You can replay difficult situations to learn how to handle them better in the future. When a worker is particularly skilled, you can study their actions and pass on their knowledge to others.
On the other hand, when mistakes are made, you’ll have full visibility, creating the opportunity for teachable moments to improve their performance — efficiency increases when your staff does their jobs better.
But there’s far more available to the savvy operator. If you need to send a piece of equipment to pick up cargo, do you choose the one closest or the one furthest away? The answer’s obvious. But if you don’t have location tracking on your entire fleet, how do you know which truck is closest? How can you tell that a particular UTR is already on its way to the desired area?
With TANGO and Terminal View, the intricate dance between the equipment and people that play out across your yard is visible at all times. You’ll know where everything is, allowing you to make the most efficient decisions possible at any given moment. In the future, we’ll be able to automate those decisions. But getting there first requires fleet visibility.
UTR pooling opportunities are also advanced. With a glance, it’s clear when vehicles are sitting idle, where they are, and where they could be more useful. You’ll discover efficiencies that were unattainable in the past because knowledge is power.
How TANGO Helps With Forensic Analysis
Modern terminals are busy places. Minor accidents aren’t uncommon. A UTR driving a bit too quickly may clip another truck on its way across the yard. When collisions occur, it’s useful to know what happened. A thorough understanding allows the creation of new safety protocols to help avoid similar problems in the future.
But just as it’s sometimes difficult to determine fault in a traffic accident, a terminal accident can be equally as inscrutable. TANGO changes this. The system records the movements of every tracked piece of equipment over time, so operators can go back to see what happened. TANGO would reveal the UTR driver’s excessive speed. Other details that would otherwise remain hidden would be easy to examine and replay. The system provides an “eye in the sky” that’s always on, always recording vital information for this type of forensic analysis.
This extra layer of data is doubly helpful when cargo goes missing. Let’s say your operation misplaces a container. In the days before TANGO, terminals would be faced with the laborious job of tracking it down among the tens of thousands of other containers in the yard, often with no way to narrow the search.
Even if you knew which vehicle dropped off the container and had a log stating where it was placed, you would be out of luck if the driver wrote it down wrong.
Now imagine TANGO was recording their vehicle’s movements. Since you know from the vehicle’s log when it dropped off the container, all you need to do is go back and watch in Terminal View where the UTR was around the time indicated. You might discover that the vehicle was in block A1 and not block C4, as erroneously shown on the log. Your search area is now significantly smaller.
Detective work requires clues. The better the clues, the easier it is to solve the case. TANGO is like your terminal’s own personal CSI.
How TANGO Helps Reduce Environmental Impact
Every time a piece of equipment moves from one part of your terminal to another, there’s an environmental impact. Fuel is burned. Emissions are released. The more you can limit these movements, then the lower your terminal’s impact will be.
In the same way that moving the closest UTR to a given container helps improve efficiency, it also reduces fuel consumption. The savings for a single trip barely registers. However, terminals perform thousands of moves per day. If you can save a bit of fuel and lower wear and tear on each of these moves, it would significantly reduce your operation’s environmental impact.
Your ability to limit impact could be a strong selling point for customers that worry about their carbon footprints. Using less fuel saves you money, and lowered wear and tear means less frequent maintenance and repair costs, making a direct impact on your bottom line.
TANGO is a win-win for you, your customers, and the environment.
How Will TANGO Help You?
We’ve explored several situations where Terminal View with TANGO proves their worth, but there’s so much more to the story. As the technology rolls across our customer base, we expect they will discover new ways to leverage our product. Manzanillo International Terminal in Panama is the first to utilize the technology and even helped Tideworks in our testing.
We’re excited to see what you come up with. With each new use case, Terminal View TANGO Trace and Go will grow even more vital.
So how will it help you? There’s only one way to find out. Give us a call today.