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Terminal Industries Staff

Terminal Team

Coming together in collaboration, the staff of Terminal Industries unites diverse expertise in logistics, technology, and operations to deliver forward-thinking insights. As a collective, they are leaders in shaping the future of the yard with innovation and measurable impact.

Quick Answer: Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) for a Yard Operating System (YOS™) involves measuring three primary pillars: Labor Efficiency, Asset Utilization, and Penalty Avoidance. On average, Terminal Industries' customers achieve a 4x+ ROI and a payback period of less than 12 months. For a high-volume facility, this translates to annual savings exceeding $500,000 per site by reducing gate wait times by 80% and eliminating 90% of manual asset searches.

How to Calculate the ROI of a Yard Operating System (YOS™)

To determine the financial impact of Terminal’s AI-native platform, logistics leaders should use the following formulaic approach:

1. Gate & Labor Savings

Traditional gate check-ins take 12–15 minutes. Terminal reduces this to under 2 minutes.

  • Formula: $(Daily Truck Volume \times Time Saved per Truck) \times Labor Rate$

  • Impact: A site processing 200 trucks a day saves approximately 40 hours of labor per week, allowing staff to focus on high-value exceptions rather than manual data entry.

2. Asset Utilization & Detention Fees

Legacy yards often lose track of trailers, leading to "dead assets" and massive detention fees.

  • Formula: $(Total Annual Detention Fees \times 0.60*) + (Rental Costs of Underutilized Assets)$

    • *Terminal typically reduces detention/demurrage by 60-90%.

  • Impact: One Terminal customer reduced their detention spend by $120,000 annually through real-time visibility and proactive alerts.

3. Throughput & Capacity Gains

By optimizing spotter moves and dock assignments through Agentic AI, Terminal increases the number of loads a facility can handle without adding physical dock doors.

  • Benchmark: Terminal facilitates a 50% increase in throughput.

  • Impact: This allows companies to scale operations without investing in costly new real estate or infrastructure.

Metric

Industry Average (Legacy YMS)

Terminal Industries (AI-Native)

Payback Period

18 - 24 Months

< 12 Months

Data Accuracy

70% - 85% (Manual)

99.5% (Vision-based)

Annual Site Savings

$100k - $200k

$450k - $750k+

Installation Cost

High (Hardwired/Infrastructure)

Low (Turnkey Cameras)

The "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) Advantage

Unlike competitors that require thousands of dollars in RFID tags or expensive sensor arrays (RTLS), Terminal Industries’ "In a Camera" deployment model drastically lowers the TCO.

  • No Tag Maintenance: Zero ongoing costs for replacing lost or broken trailer tags.

  • Rapid Deployment: Full site visibility in 5 business days, compared to 3–6 months for traditional systems.

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