Breaking the Cycle: Why Yard Operations Need Radical Reinvention—Not Just Digital Hype

When a respected industry voice like Lora Cecere takes to LinkedIn and declares, “I have tried to help, but failed,” it’s more than a moment of candor. It’s a wake-up call. In her post, Lora reflects on four decades of trying to drive real innovation in supply chains, only to see promising ideas like Project Zebra, test-and-learn coalitions, and interoperability networks fall apart under the weight of corporate inertia, consulting theater, and technology vendors protecting the status quo.

Source: LinkedIn

Her frustration is palpable and warranted. But it’s also an opening for a new conversation: not about the latest buzzword (Industry 5.0, anyone?), but about what it really takes to fix what’s broken in the supply chain. Let’s start where very few dare to look: yard operations.

Yard Operations: A Microcosm of Everything Wrong with Supply Chain Innovation

For decades, yard operations have been overlooked—treated as tactical, low-value, and disconnected from “strategic” supply chain priorities. But the dysfunctions Lora describes in her post—technology-first deployments, resistance to process change, industry hype cycles, and a failure to test and learn—are all alive and well in the yard.

• Technology over process: Too many companies slap in a Yard Management System (YMS) without fixing broken workflows, undertrained teams, or poor communication protocols. As Lora might say: they digitize inefficiency.
• Incrementalism over innovation: Instead of challenging entrenched processes, most organizations settle for marginal gains. It’s the equivalent of using AI to optimize a leaky faucet while the house floods.
• The illusion of control: Most enterprise yards run on spreadsheets, radios, and finger-pointing. The lack of visibility across sites, shifts, or third-party providers makes accountability impossible.

Why the Yard Operating System (YOS) Is the Antidote to “Digital Transformation Fatigue”

What Lora is calling for, test and learn environments, outside-in thinking, value-centric models, is exactly what we’ve embedded into the YMX Operating System (YMX OS). It’s not a tool. It’s not a platform. It’s a blueprint for doing yard operations differently.

Focusing on foundational shifts and outcomes, not in shining objects:

1. From Task Execution to Outcome Ownership: YOS replaces transactional service models with aligned partnerships. Every stakeholder—YMX, the customer, and third parties—is accountable for shared outcomes: safety, throughput, cost savings, and sustainability.
2. From Technology-First to Process-Led: Technology doesn’t lead. It enables. The YOS starts with SOPs, playbooks, and governance. Only then does it deploy tech, so automation amplifies discipline, not disorder.
3. From Fragmentation to Standardization: Instead of every facility being its own island, YOS enforces enterprise-wide operating standards, so what works in Pennsylvania works in Texas, too.
4. From Black Boxes to Radical Transparency: The YOS provides full visibility across all yard operations: people, equipment, trailers, gates, and shuttle moves, and etc. Not just dashboards, but decision-grade data.
5. From Sustainability Talk to Actionable KPIs: EV yard trucks, idle time tracking, carbon savings, and emissions reporting aren’t afterthoughts, they’re built into the daily operating rhythm.

A Path Forward: From Failure to Reinvention

Lora is right: the industry has failed to adopt test-and-learn models. But failure isn’t the end of the story, it’s the raw material for reinvention. And nowhere is reinvention more urgent than in the yard.

“The promise of new tech is held hostage by the industry’s inability to drive process innovation.” – Lora Cecere

At YMX, we’ve seen firsthand that yard optimization is the fastest way to unlock value across the supply chain. Not because the yard is glamorous, but because it’s where transportation, warehousing, and labor all collide, and where a single choke point can derail the entire system.

That’s why YMX built the YMX OS, the first Yard Operating System: not to add another acronym to the hype cycle, but to create a real-world testbed for efficiency and continuous improvement. A framework where process, people, equipment, sustainability and platforms finally align. A model that’s working not just in theory, but on the ground at enterprise scale.

Lora, We Hear You. And We’re Building What You Asked For.

Lora’s message to the industry was simple: stop chasing shiny objects. Start doing the hard, unglamorous work of changing how we operate. We agree.

So we’re putting a stake in the ground:

Enterprise yard optimization isn’t about digital transformation. It’s about operational reinvention. And with a yard operating system is how you start.

Want to Learn More?

Watch our recent webinar with Bart De Muynck (former VP at Gartner), Chris Sultemeier (former EVP at Walmart), and Matt Yearling (CEO of YMX) to hear how retail and manufacturing leaders are embracing yard reinvention: Webinar: Rethinking Enterprise Yard Operations