Book the right slot, every time.
Smart Slots highlights the appointment times that keep your yard moving, your team on break, and your costs down.
How it works
Create a booking
Carrier dispatcher or operations manager opens a new appointment for the destination site.
See the right times first
Smart Slots shows recommended times at the top with a clear, plain-English reason — and never recommends a time that would force your team to work through a break.
Confirm
Pick a slot. Booking is confirmed. Audit trail captures the recommendation set offered and the choice made — fully reproducible for GMP review.
Three modes — you choose
Tight ops control
Only recommended, break-safe slots are bookable. Best for tightly controlled yards with hard staffing budgets and unionised lunch rules.
Best for most yards
Recommended slots highlighted, but everything stays bookable. Carriers can pick any time — if it crosses a break, they acknowledge the truck will wait.
Legacy booking
No recommendations shown — equivalent to legacy YARDtwin booking. Break windows are still enforced at runtime: trucks landing mid-break wait until the break ends.
Your team's break is sacred.
So are tea breaks, shift changes, and end-of-day wind-downs. Smart Slots knows about every break window you configure — and it never recommends a slot that would force a truck to be loaded or unloaded during one. Trucks that would otherwise land mid-break are gently steered to slots that work for everyone.
- • Default break windows — Lunch (12:00–13:00) and End-of-shift wind-down (16:30–17:00) are seeded for every new site. Edit, add, or disable from the Site Admin panel.
- • Hard or soft — mark a break as hard (work cannot span it in any mode) or soft (a scoring penalty that nudges recommendations away).
- • Up to 8 break windows per site — covers lunch, multiple tea breaks, shift handovers, audit-day blocks.
- • Runtime enforcement — even Off-mode bookings get held at the gate when a break is in progress, with full audit trail.
What sites typically see
Conservative range, mid-market pharma yard, 50–150 movements/day, after 60-day stabilisation.
| Lever | Annual saving |
|---|---|
| Earlier daily yard close | €25,000 – €50,000 |
| Eliminated overtime (Strict) | €8,000 – €20,000 |
| Reduced peak overstaffing | €15,000 – €30,000 |
| Demurrage avoidance | €10,000 – €40,000 |
| Total indicative range (Strict) | €58,000 – €140,000 |
FAQs
Is my data used to train any model?
In Phase 1, no. The scoring engine is fully deterministic — no machine learning. Phase 2 retraining (when introduced) is per-tenant by default; cross-tenant training would require explicit opt-in and a separate DPA addendum.
Can I turn it off?
Yes. Site administrators can switch to Off mode at any time, per-carrier or globally. Break windows still apply at runtime even in Off mode.
What if my carriers don't like the recommendations?
In Smart mode (default) they can pick any slot — recommendations are advisory. Override reasons are captured so you can see patterns and tune your configuration.
Does Smart Slots ever overrule me?
Only in Strict mode, where break-overlap is a hard constraint and only recommended slots are bookable. Site admins always have unrestricted override even in Strict mode.
What happens if a carrier really needs to book during a break?
In Smart mode, they can — they just acknowledge the truck will wait until the break ends. In Strict mode, those slots aren't bookable. In Off mode, the booking goes through and the truck simply waits at runtime.
Is it audit-ready for GMP / 21 CFR Part 11?
Yes. Every recommendation request, slot score, weight set, mode resolution, override, and break-pushback writes an immutable audit row. Re-running the engine against archived inputs reproduces the same output.
Compliance
GMP audit trail covering every recommendation, override, mode change, and break-pushback. 21 CFR Part 11 alignment via reproducible deterministic scoring. GDPR posture: no new categories of personal data are processed; driver personal data is never used as a Smart Slots input. See our Privacy Policy, GDPR Policy, and Data Processing Agreement.
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