A mountain-based production site had a hard ceiling. 50 trucks a day. Every truck beyond that was a truck turned away.

Some constraints are organisational. This one was physical.

Challenge

The facility sat in a mountain location - limited land, fixed infrastructure, no room to expand the yard. When demand grew, the site couldn't grow with it. The daily ceiling of 50 trucks wasn't a target. It was a wall.

And behind that wall, the problems compounded quietly.

Gate check-ins and check-outs were handled manually. During peak hours, queues built up while staff worked through paper-based processes. Dock assignments were made without live data which meant mismatches, wasted time, and trucks waiting in positions they shouldn't have been in. Nobody had a real-time view of where trailers were, or which docks were actually available.

The core logistics systems were running in parallel - useful in isolation, disconnected in practice. The gap between what was happening in the yard and what the systems knew about it was measured in hours, not minutes.

There was no single crisis. There didn't need to be. The mill needed to run at the highest capacity its location allowed, and the yard wasn't going to let it.

The question wasn't whether to fix it. It was whether fixing it was even possible without building a new facility.

It was.

Solution

There was a schedule. There had to be. But the data feeding it was hours behind the yard, which meant the schedule was always reacting, never planning.

We could have tried to tighten that reaction. Instead, we rebuilt the data underneath - so the schedule had something true to stand on.

IGT Systems deployed real-time trailer tracking across the full yard footprint and automated gate check-in and check-out, removing manual steps from the highest-friction points in the operation.

Dock assignment moved from guesswork to intelligence - allocation driven by live yard state, loading sequences, and production schedules. A centralised orchestration layer tied all yard activities together and connected directly to the core logistics systems the business already ran on.

The yard stopped being a blind spot. Every trailer position, dock status, and task queue became visible to operations teams in real time. Yard data and business data finally came from the same source.

Delivery Approach

The risk wasn't the technology. It was the cutover. A site running at capacity can't take a weekend offline to switch systems, and yard operations can't tolerate a "trust me" rollout - every shift has muscle memory built around the old way.

So cutover was phased by yard zone. Manual and automated processes ran in parallel during transition. Each zone was validated against live operations before the next was activated. Risk was contained at every step.

The first zones went live in late 2021. A quarter of post-launch iteration followed - the kind of tuning a system only earns by running in production.

Production never stopped.

Results

The ceiling is gone.

+200% production capacity: the 50-truck daily ceiling disappeared. The operation outgrew its physical constraint without expanding the facility.

-40% truck waiting time: gate and dock automation eliminated the queuing that had built up during peak hours.

Full yard visibility: trailer positions, dock status, and task queues visible to operations teams in real time.

Seamless integration: yard operations and logistics execution now run from shared, live data.

More than a throughput win, this changed what "capacity" means for the site. The next time demand grows, the conversation isn't about building. It's about tuning.

The platform itself has continued to mature - migrated to containers from mid-2022, fully production-containerised since May 2023. The system that lifted the ceiling is still scaling with the site.