CCJ Innovators profiles carriers and fleets that have found innovative ways to overcome trucking’s challenges. If you know a carrier that has displayed innovation, contact CCJ Chief Editor Jason Cannon at [email protected] or 800-633-5953.
Keller Logistics Group (KLG) has been executing shuttle and spotting services for over two decades. Now, the Defiance, Ohio-based company has taken that experience and applied it in the development of its own yard management system (YMS) for greater visibility and insights into yard operations at customer sites.
Keller Trucking, KLG’s oldest and largest business unit with about 350 power units and 460 drivers split between over-the-road operations and spotting and shuttling services, has taken a product that was developed in house originally to support KLG’s warehouse operations – managing dock scheduling and trailers – and modified and optimized it for customers’ yard operations.
Jonathan Wolfrum, president of Keller Trucking, said KLG has used a variation of the product for seven or eight years but recently got serious about developing it. The YMS, called YardLink powered by Keller, rolled out mid-year 2025.
Wolfrum said while there were plenty of YMS products on the market, there wasn’t a single product that offered the customized approach Keller was seeking.
“We want to drive productivity with our drivers and our tractors and make sure that we’re providing value to our customer – no matter if they have a true need for a yard management system or not,” he said. “There was no product in the market that really gave us that full functionality, so we wanted to build what you would call a traditional yard management system with all the capabilities that our competitors have, along with what we call a driver workflow function that we can scale through all of our operations over time.”
How it works
Ben Pierce, chief strategy officer, at Keller Logistics Group, said YardLink provides live yard visibility, gate check-in/out, dock scheduling, driver move requests and automatic time stamps for dwell and detention.
“We needed a tool that mirrors how our partners yards actually run, integrates with systems our customers need to have visibility, and lets us improve weekly based on operator feedback,” Pierce said. “Owning the roadmap and the data helps us reduce manual radio traffic, shorten turns and gives shippers a single source of truth.”
Prior to deployment, the Keller team gathers all that necessary data, including number of docks, trailers and spots in the yard and the number of drivers that will use the platform.
Gabe Vittorio, director of dedicated services at Keller Trucking, said customers can login to the software and add a task for the driver. The YMS then asks a set of questions: trailer number, trailer status: loaded or empty, and where the trailer is coming from and where it needs to go.
Once the YMS is deployed on the first day, YardLink captures all that information and automatically populates it, so all the customer needs to do is assign a trailer to a location in the yard. They also have the capability to add notes to the task.
Upon completion of the entry, it gets sent to the tablets in the drivers’ trucks so they can view the task – and all the necessary information – in the queue and accept it.
Customer engagement
Keller has found that one size doesn’t fit all – one size fits one, Pierce said. With such a diverse customer base, he said the customization capabilities of YardLink have enabled greater efficiency.
YardLink has officially been implemented by two of Keller’s customers.
The YMS gives customers insights into their yard operations data with different metrics reported back to them. Wolfrum said Keller has been able to be nimble with that, giving the customer specific views of specific reports. He said that ability has resulted in positive customer feedback as opposed to some of the larger YMS providers that push customers to fit into their existing product design.
“There are a lot of players in this space, and what we feel that we can offer is customization,” Vittorio added.
He said the two sites where YardLink has been deployed were previously operating a very manual process where shipping and receiving clerks were assigning work to drivers with pen and paper. Inventory of trailers was managed in an Excel spreadsheet, he said.
“Now they have the capability to track and trace where trailers are, their status: loaded or empty. It also allowed for some efficiencies when communicating the work that needs done,” Vittorio said. “So instead of a driver waiting at the window for a list of moves to get done, the clerks can just log in, assign moves and the work for the drivers to do through this platform. It's a seamless transaction, and there's no idle time between work being completed or assigned.”
Wolfrum said Keller will continue to work with its customers to further develop the YMS, including adding artificial intelligence capabilities, and make improvements as needed based on feedback.
That will be part of what Wolfrum called Phase 3: the future roadmap.
Phase 1 was testing. He said Keller performed a six-month trial at its own yard about two years ago where it had people manning the gate to test the product and identify gaps. Keller is currently in Phase 2, deploying the YMS.
“It's been a long evolution of real-world testing to come up with the product in the manner that we did,” Wolfrum said.
The CCJ Innovators program is sponsored by Comdata, ExxonMobil, Fleetworthy and Mack Trucks.
