Dock planning in harvest season
Five practical rules for keeping docks balanced on busy harvest days: quota, fair order, live monitoring and end of day.
The busy day is known in advance
The harvest calendar is known. Which supplier will send how many trucks on a given day is often not. Planning starts with reducing this uncertainty before it reaches the gate.
Five rules
One: set a daily slot quota per company. When suppliers book their slot from the panel before setting off, you see the day's load a day earlier, not in the morning.
Two: apply fair order. When every company's first truck goes in before anyone's second truck, a single supplier cannot block a dock.
Three: split docks by load type. Tipper and non-tipper trucks take different times to unload. Mixing them at the same dock slows the flow.
Four: watch the yard live. A manager who sees how many trucks are at each stage spots the bottleneck before trucks pile up.
Five: manage the end of the day. Sending the trucks at the dock a message with a confirm link for the next day sets up the morning queue the evening before.
No improvement without measurement
Track average waiting and processing time per shift. Once you see which dock slows down at which hour, the plan for the next day becomes clear by itself.