Forty minutes nobody can account for

1. The scene

   Six forty-five in the morning in the yard of a distribution center. It’s cold, and three trucks have had their engines running for a while, waiting. Dock 4 has been occupied since 6:05 a.m.: a trailer parked with its doors open and nobody loading inside. The yard supervisor walks back and forth with a clipboard, answering the radio and deciding by eye who goes to which dock.

2. Where it breaks

   Nobody is measuring anything. The yard supervisor keeps the times in his head and on a sheet of paper, and his head has the same problem as any head at seven in the morning. The yard cameras record, but they don’t count minutes. At the end of the day there’ll be a figure for trucks unloaded and no explanation of why they left late.

3. What happens

   At 6:45 a.m., dock 4 has been occupied for forty minutes without a single pallet moving. The forklift that should be working there is at dock 7, because someone called for it on the radio. The three trucks are still waiting, and every one of them will be late to its next stop.

4. With IRIS

   IRIS watches the yard and counts. It knows when a trailer arrives at a dock, when it opens, when the first pallet moves and when it leaves. Operations writes one rule — dock occupied more than twenty minutes with no activity, tell the yard supervisor — and by 6:25 a.m. he already knows, with the camera and the running time. He is still the one who decides whether to move the forklift or switch docks. And at the end of the day he has the minutes for every dock, not a feeling.

The same camera that today only records can start measuring your operation.