The modern logistics yard is broken — and it’s been broken for decades. While transportation and warehouse systems have evolved into data-rich, automated powerhouses, the yard remains the industry’s blind spot: more than 70% still run on clipboards, radios, and human guesswork. Legacy yard management systems promised transformation but delivered fragmentation — disconnected from TMS, WMS, and ERP platforms, and incapable of keeping pace with today’s 24/7, high-throughput demands. Now, a convergence of pressures and possibilities — from post-COVID digitization and labor shortages to breakthroughs in computer vision and agentic AI — has created a once-in-a-generation inflection point. The time has finally come to fix the weakest link in global logistics. The following is a series from Ryan Arroyo, VP of Product at Terminal Industries, to discuss how first principles thinking will help cutting-edge AI technologies finally solve the yard and close data and operations gap for good between highway and warehouse. 

The phrase “first principles” can sound academic. It isn’t. Practically, it means you stop accepting hand-me-down explanations and rebuild a solution from the ground up using only what must be true. You identify the goal, the hard constraints that won’t budge, the signals you can actually observe, and the limited set of actions you can take. Then you run short feedback loops until the goal moves. No reverence for precedent. No faith in folklore. Just physics, facts, and iteration.

Picture a yard at 7:15 a.m. Trucks idle in two lines. A guard scans IDs. Someone radios for a door. A forklift team learns about the trailer after it’s already staged. Everyone is working hard. The process is working them harder.

Now, restart the scene from zero. The goal is not “process check-in.” The goal is “unload cargo from a trailer, safely, quickly, and at the lowest cost.” What has to be true for that to happen. What can be observed without asking anyone to type. What would prove the change actually helped, not just felt modern.

When you think this way, the gate stops being a ritual and becomes a validation point. A door isn’t a place to park; it’s a scarce resource you schedule like a runway. A form is not a task; it’s a proxy for a missing signal you should sense upstream. The yard becomes a flow, not a set of stations.

A story from the ground

On one of my first site visits, I stood beside a guard shack where a driver handed over paper that duplicated information the shipper had already sent. The guard keyed it in. A printer chirped. The driver waited again at staging because a door wasn’t ready. None of this was malicious. It was simply what the old constraints demanded: people at the gate, no reliable identity upstream, doors assigned when the building saw the truck with their own eyes.

We cleared the whiteboard and asked only first-principles questions.

What is the exact objective? “Cut median gate-to-unload time, without increasing safety risk.” What will never change? “Two inbound lanes, 18 doors, cold-chain rules, union break windows, legal identity capture.” What can we observe without asking anyone to retype a thing? “License plates, cargo asset IDs, timestamps, door sensors, driver phone numbers provided at scheduling.” What actions are truly available. “Pre-clear identity, assign doors before arrival, notify drivers and forklifts automatically, reserve staging for unavoidable cases.” What feedback would prove any of that mattered. “Shorter dwell for the median driver and the slowest 10%, fewer door-idle minutes, fewer detention dollars.”

We didn’t “digitize” the clipboard. We made the clipboard irrelevant. Identity moved upstream. The door decision moved earlier. Staging became a rare exception rather than a habit. The guard shack validated anomalies instead of processing every single truck. People did less work and the yard moved faster because the flow matched reality instead of tradition.

How first principles behaves in a yard

First principles reframes every step in terms of flow. The question is never “what screen do we need.” The question is “what has to be true for the next value-creating step to start.”

If identity is verifiable before arrival, do it then. The gate should confirm a match, not repeat the work. If a door and a person will be ready when the truck hits the property line, send the driver there directly. If staging exists “to buy time,” eliminate the need for that time by solving the readiness problem that staging masks. If a paper form exists “because something once went wrong,” redesign the process so the same failure can’t occur, and keep a narrow exception path for outliers.

Working this way is not an appeal to technology for its own sake. It is an appeal to causality. Every change must shrink wait time, unlock constrained capacity, or remove cost without compromising a hard constraint. If it doesn’t, it’s theater.

Why my outsider lens helps

I did not come up through logistics. I haven’t absorbed the language that turns yesterday’s workaround into today’s rule. That absence is useful. It lets me ask “why do we do this at the gate at all” without social baggage. It lets me treat a door as a scarce resource, not a foregone stop. It lets me see a form as a failed sensor, not a sacred artifact.

The advantage is not ignorance; it’s the lack of inherited bias. I bring a product discipline built in other domains: begin with the outcome, surface the non-negotiables, sense what matters, act on the few levers that move the outcome, measure the change, and kill the rest. In a legacy-heavy environment, that discipline is the difference between installing software and changing the system.

From ritual to flow: a day one exercise

Walk a single shipment from the highway to the warehouse with a stopwatch. Narrate aloud what value is added at each moment and what’s simply waiting for someone else to be ready. You will find that most time is spent proving identity, hunting for information, or compensating for poor timing between scarce resources. None of that moves freight. It exists because the system relies on people to carry state across steps.

Now rebuild the same path as if you had no forms, no stations, no humans in the yard - only facts and constraints. The driver is known or not; if known, the system should treat that arrival as a confirmation, not an investigation. The door is ready or not; if ready, the driver goes there without staging, and the forklift learns about it the moment the gate opens. If not ready, the driver receives an honest arrival window that keeps the yard uncongested and the driver out of detention. This is not science fiction. It is the ordinary result of aligning information with decisions in time.

What changes in software when you start from zero

Interfaces stop being the center of gravity. The model of the flow becomes the product. Events—gate opened, door occupied, trailer moved—drive decisions. Rules handle the deterministic parts: cold loads only to cold doors, PPE where required, union windows respected. Learning applies where variability persists: how long specific doors actually take for specific load types at specific times.

Crucially, humans remain in the loop with an override that requires a reason. Those reasons become new signals. If operators frequently override a rule, the rule is wrong or a constraint was misidentified. Either way, the system improves because it treats overrides as data, not as a nuisance.

Integration stops meaning “we have an API” and starts meaning “the people who need to act don’t retype facts.” If the WMS knows the cargo and the TMS knows the appointment, the yard shouldn’t ask the driver to prove what the shipper already attested. The yard should use those facts to make a better door decision sooner - and in the best cases without any human interaction at all.

Guardrails that keep this honest

First principles is not a license to break safety or compliance. Hard constraints remain hard. The discipline is to name them explicitly so the team stops arguing about opinionated constraints and starts solving around immovable ones. When a change is proposed, require a plain justification: what outcome it is expected to move, which constraint it touches, what signal will confirm success, and what rollback you will trigger if it misfires. Without a rollback, you are experimenting on hope.

Then report deltas regularly. Not screenshots. Not adjectives. Dwell time reduced for the median driver. Door idle time during staffed hours. Moves per labor hour. Detention dollars per hundred loads. If these don’t move, the system didn’t improve.

The point

First principles is not a slogan. It is a way of stripping away ceremony until only the work that moves freight remains. It’s useful in logistics because logistics has accumulated rituals meant for an earlier set of constraints. Those rituals look like a process. They are often just friction.

Start from zero. State the goal as a number. Name the non-negotiables. Sense only what matters. Act only where you have leverage. Measure the change and kill the rest.