Tideworks TANGO Trace and Go: Rectify Bottlenecks in Your Terminal with Off-the-Shelf GPS

Whether you’re a small terminal or a massive, multi-modal operation, knowing where your equipment is and what it’s doing at all times is the best way to find bottlenecks and realize efficiencies.

But most equipment tracking solutions on the market today are resource prohibitive, requiring specialized equipment and labor-intensive installations. They’re generally reserved for larger pieces of machinery, like top-picks, side-picks, and RTGs.

Most operations have fewer pieces of large equipment, which makes installation more palatable. Additionally, because this machinery is involved in gathering containers from or placing them in their resting locations, onboard tracking equipment allows precise inventory management.

UTR Tracking

But what about the myriad of UTRs that spend shift after shift cycling cargo back and forth between these larger pieces of equipment? It would undoubtedly be useful to know where they are and where they’re going. They are a terminal’s circulatory system. If they get jammed up, the rest of the operation slows down as well.

Most mid to large-sized terminal operations run too many UTRs to install expensive tracking solutions economically. And so this critical infrastructure element — the beating heart of the operation — has been largely ignored in automated systems, until now.

With TANGO Trace and Go from Tideworks, you can track all of your UTRs, whether you have 20 or 200, with economical, off-the-shelf GPS equipment. Better yet, the software allows terminals to record their movements, as well as any other GPS or DGPS-enabled equipment, for later review.

A cutting edge innovation only available in Terminal View, TANGO gives you unprecedented access to the inner workings of your yard, allowing the discovery of even the most elusive bottlenecks. TANGO is an efficient solution that saves your operation money, emissions, and heartache. Yard bumps, be on notice, TANGO has finally arrived.

Let’s Go to the Replay!

Imagine you’re a football coach. Standard practice is to record every game so you can go back and review what the players did right and what they did wrong.

What if your recording equipment ignored the plays that brought the ball to the end zone, and you only had access to the action that resulted in a touchdown? How useful would that be?

Not very. You’re missing a massive volume of data that your players could learn from. That’s the situation that terminals find themselves in when they ignore the many moves UTRs make, bringing “the ball” to “the end zone.”

The TANGO feature gives you a holistic view of your yard, allowing you to examine replays of everything that happened in your operation.

To extend our analogy, imagine the insights your football team could gain if you could view replays of a specific pattern, run across every game you used it. You might discover common quarterback errors that weren’t apparent when viewed separately. Or you might find that a specific running back was more successful with the pattern than others. This knowledge could influence upcoming yard and vessel plans immensely.

With TANGO, you can apply this kind of historical analysis to your terminal operation. You can look at driver performance across all shifts to learn why some are more productive than others. If specific cranes are underperforming, you might discover the cause is inefficient UTR movements.

TANGO is designed to supplement existing tracking solutions while adding impressive new features and a holistic view of your operation. As such, its recordings aren’t granular enough for automation or inventory tracking purposes. It doesn’t record precise equipment locations. But it doesn’t need to.

Instead, it gives you rough approximations of all of your equipment, including UTRs, small truck fleets, and even personnel, using wearable GPS devices. These locations are tracked and recorded through time to give you a moving snapshot of your entire operation at any moment.

Amplify Terminal View with TANGO’s Benefits by Pairing With Tideworks Insight

Terminal View gives terminal operators a 3D visualization of their terminal. Traffic Control operators can see equipment moving in real-time using standard DGPS equipment for unparalleled move planning and execution.

When you add TANGO to the Terminal View mix, this view blossoms further, adding UTRs and personnel into the mix. It also becomes a visual time machine, enabling operators to watch shift recordings from any point in the past. You might review a particularly nasty yard bump for insights into its cause. Monitoring the equipment through Terminal View’s 3D simulation gives you a bird’s eye view that was previously unavailable.

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But sometimes, there’s more to the data than can be seen by the naked eye. That’s where Tideworks Insight shines. Maybe you have an operator that’s regularly driving twice the distance of similar drivers. Watching his shifts in Terminal View will give you some perspective, but imagine if you fed the data from TANGO for every shift over two months into Tideworks Insight.

You could run statistical analyses on all of the driver’s movements, looking for patterns. You can compare his performance to the performance of every other driver. You can slice his shifts into any time slice you like and run detailed comparisons.

Pairing TANGO’s recording capabilities with the data-driven revelations found in Tideworks Insight and the visual reference of Terminal View, the problem becomes easy to find. You might discover a history of bad move assignments, equipment problems, or poor execution. Whatever issues your terminal is suffering from, the robust combination of Traffic Control, Terminal View with TANGO,  and Tideworks Insight can pull back the curtain to reveal the source.

Want to make more data-driven decisions in your terminal?

TANGO Replaces Other Inexpensive Solutions and Does So Much More

Up to now, if terminal operators wanted to track UTRs and other lightweight equipment, they would add a pager system or install a cheap android device.

Pagers keep Traffic Control connected to the equipment but give no visual feedback, real-time location data, and no recording capability. There’s also no way to verify if the information coming from the equipment operator is accurate.

Android devices add extra functionality but still fall well short of TANGO’s monitoring and recording capabilities. With TANGO, you’ll know where all of your equipment is, at all times, with real-time tracking and historical recordings. With all the existing benefits of Terminal View and Tideworks Insight, TANGO becomes a powerful forensic tool for finding bottlenecks, inefficiencies, poor performance, and areas for improvement.

Of course, there are positive insights to be had, as well. You can study the movements of your best-performing operators to learn their process. Gain insights by examining shifts where everything went perfectly to plan and compare those against shifts with errors.

In short, Terminal View’s TANGO opens your eyes to a world of data that has been obscured from view, blowing open new possibilities for efficiency gains, lowered costs, and increased revenues.

If you’d like more information on how the new TANGO Track and Trace capabilities within Terminal View can integrate into your operation, schedule a meeting with your CSM today.