How One DC Network Eliminated 54,000 Driver Calls a Month

Greg Braun has spent 35 years in transportation and logistics, the last 25 specializing in yard and dock management software. He started as an IT manager at one of Quebec's largest carriers, then co-founded C3 Solutions, where he has spent two and a half decades opening new markets and sitting across the table from operators trying to fix their distribution centers.

After that long in the category, Greg can usually predict what he'll find when he walks into a new customer's DC. The customer is doing nothing systematic for yard management. The coordination layer is held together by phone calls and a clipboard.

"That means 99% of the new customers we deal with are doing nothing for yard management," Greg says. "It's radios and clipboards."

That picture is backed up by C3's State of Dock and Yard Management 2026 report, which surveys where operators actually stand on yard automation.

When he started selling yard management software, Greg assumed the category would become standard infrastructure the way warehouse management and transportation management systems did. It never quite did. Part of the reason, Greg has come to believe, is that the most visible benefit of yard software is not always its largest one, and operators tend to size up the whole category based on that one piece.

Every so often, an operator looks past it and points at a different problem. When that happens, the project tends to deliver outsized results. This is the story of one of those operators, a major U.S. grocery retailer, and the job function they decided to eliminate.

What’s Inside

1. The pushback that reframed the project

2. Why the real value sits past the gate

3. What the grocer actually built

4. How the grocer got 97% of drivers onto the system

5. What separates the operators who get this right

The pushback that reframed the project

Greg walked into the grocer's headquarters with the standard playbook: streamline the gate, reduce labor at check-in, cut driver wait time. The operations team listened, and then they offered a different way to see it.

"That's not our first priority," they told him. "We have a job title called callers."

Phone-based driver coordination is common. Greg will tell you there isn't a warehouse in the country that doesn't take down a driver's phone number. What caught his attention was that this grocer had made it a formal, named job position, staffed by more than one person,. People whose primary job function was picking up a phone and dialing drivers. Your paperwork's ready. Come to the gate. Report to receiving. Move to door 14. Those calls were not one moment in the driver's visit. They tracked him across the whole site, from the entrance to the dock and back out.

Each driver received at least two calls per visit. The grocer's six DCs were handling roughly 1,058 driver arrivals per day on average. The math worked out to tens of thousands of phone calls per month, placed by people on company time, to coordinate work that the technology could route on its own.

It was a new way to see the problem, and Greg says it changed how he thought about it. "I hadn't thought of it that way before," he recalls.

A reasonable question is why a problem this size went unaddressed for so long. Greg's answer is scale and sequencing. The grocer had bigger yard problems ahead of it. A typical customer might run five to seven yard drivers; this grocer ran around thirty at peak. When the yard problems are that large, the cost of the caller role, real as it is, sits behind them in line. It was not that nobody saw the calls. It was that the calls were not yet the most expensive thing on the list.

The takeaway: The biggest labor costs in a yard operation are usually invisible from outside the building. Operators who can name the cost can fix it. Operators who can't, can't.

Why the real value sits past the gate

The most visible benefit of yard management software is gate automation: faster check-ins, less labor at the booth, better trailer visibility in the parking lot. Greg is clear that this is real and worth doing. Automating the gate solves a genuine bottleneck for a lot of operators.

But it tends to be where the conversation stops, both for vendors pitching the software and for operators evaluating it. The benefits that are harder to see, and often larger, are in the workflows that happen after the driver is checked in.

"Improving in-yard workflows is also very, very important," Greg says. "It's important in terms of efficiency, but in safety, in throughput, in all these kinds of things."

The clearest example is throughput. Several of C3's larger customers, operators with serious analytics teams, have studied their warehouse throughput after adopting yard management and found gains they didn't expect. They were not handling a higher volume of trailers. They were sequencing the trailers better. A trailer with cross-dockable freight, brought to a door at the right time, generates more throughput than a trailer whose goods have to be staged on the floor, where they create congestion. When the yard can prioritize which trailer goes to which door, in what sequence, the warehouse runs faster.

"We've had customers come back and say, how did we improve that much? It couldn't have just been because of the yard," Greg says. "But it is."

Greg gives a concrete example of the kind of coordination that happens past the gate. At many warehouses, the receiving team takes the driver's keys before unloading so the truck can't pull away mid-job. In the old setup, that meant another phone call, or a driver told to wait somewhere until someone came to find him. Inside C3 Hive, the receiver acknowledges the keys in the system, and the driver gets a message back telling him roughly how long the job will take and that he can wait in his truck. None of this touches the gate. All of it used to require a person making contact by hand.

The caller role at this grocer was a version of the same pattern. The phone calls were not a yard problem in the conventional sense. They were a coordination problem that happened to be handled by people in the yard.

The takeaway: Don't ask what yard management does at the gate. Ask what coordination work happens downstream of the gate, and who's doing it manually.

What the grocer actually built

C3's Hive platform is, technically, a shipper - driver  collaboration platform. Functionally, it replaces the caller role with an automated message flow tied to the warehouse's readiness state. A driver pulls up to the gate, scans a QR code on their paperwork or opens a link sent by SMS, and from that point on, every status change the warehouse logs triggers a message to them: ready for the gate, proceed to door 14, drop your keys at receiving, paperwork is ready, come pick it up. No app download, no account creation, no login.

The no-app architecture is the most important design choice in the platform, and it took Greg's team a long time to land on it. Their first instinct, like most teams', was to build a mobile app. Drivers didn't want it.

"Nobody is going to download an app for a place they're going to be at once," Greg says. "We went through a lot of iterations before we realized this is how it has to be."

The platform runs as a progressive web app, so it renders like a native app inside the driver's browser with nothing to install. It also auto-detects the language of the driver's phone, which matters because the grocer's network handles significant volumes of Spanish-speaking carriers from Mexico, alongside smaller populations of Russian and Eastern European drivers. When a Romanian driver opens the link on his phone in Texas, the interface comes up in Romanian.

The takeaway: Any system that requires a one-time visitor to install software has already failed the design test. Assume the driver is there once.

How the grocer got 97% of drivers onto the system

The first DC went live one month after contract signing. Full rollout across all six sites took six months. Once all six were live, the results were:

• 54,000 phone calls eliminated per month, network-wide across the six DCs

• 90% reduction in  time spent on calling duties

• 97% of inbound drivers on the automated communication channel

Driver adoption is the number that determines whether the project worked, and Greg is emphatic about it. Below roughly 70%, the caller role still has to exist; it is just slightly less busy. Near 97%, it doesn't need to exist at all. The return on the project lives almost entirely inside that gap.

C3 has watched companies fail to close it. The technology delivers the workflow on day one. Whether it is still delivering it in month six depends on whether someone on the operations team is willing to refuse exceptions.

"You need someone on the operations side who owns adoption and isn't afraid to push back on exceptions," Greg says. "Every 'can we just keep calling this one carrier' is a crack in the system. The companies that hold the line get to 97%. The ones that don't plateau around 70% and wonder why they didn't get the ROI they expected."

Adoption was helped by the fact that drivers got something out of it. Greg describes the situation the system replaced: a driver room with a dispatch window, fifteen drivers inside it, each one asking when their load would be ready. For the drivers it meant standing around. For the receiving staff fielding the same question over and over, it was a steady irritant. With Hive, a driver gets a text when the load is ready and can wait in his truck until then. The pitch to the driver was not about helping the warehouse. It was that he could skip the line.

The mixed age of the driver pool mattered less than Greg expected. Drivers in their twenties and thirties needed no instruction; they scanned the code and went. Older drivers sometimes needed a short walkthrough, two or three minutes, and then they had it. What carried both groups was the same incentive. Once a driver understood that using the system meant staying in his truck instead of standing in a line, the rest took care of itself.

This grocer held the line. The operations excellence manager who championed the project owned inbound flow metrics and had, in Greg's words, been "tired of seeing their team's time swallowed by phone duty" for years. When the project went live, requests to keep calling specific carriers were declined. The 3% of drivers who never made it onto the platform were treated as edge cases rather than as reasons to keep the caller role on staff part-time. Those edge cases fell into three buckets:

• A one-off driver whose phone number wasn't captured ahead of arrival

• A driver whose phone couldn't reliably receive SMS at that location

• A team-driver swap, where the phone on file wasn't the phone at the gate

None of these are large enough to undermine the system. But each one is the kind of exception that, if accommodated, slowly rebuilds the caller role over time.

The takeaway: The platform delivers the workflow. A person delivers the adoption. Without the second, the first reverts.

What separates the operators who get this right

Across the projects Greg has seen, three things tend to separate the operators who capture the ROI from the ones who don't. An operator can use them as a checklist before scoping a project.

1. They can locate the caller role in their own operation. It usually doesn't have a job title. It is a function spread across several people and several shifts. The operators who succeed have already identified the hidden labor and measured the hours before a vendor walks in the door. That measurement is the business case.
   

2. They look past the gate. Gate automation is real and worth doing. But an operator who stops there captures only the most visible part of the value. The operators who get the most out of yard automation have done the work to find where their coordination labor actually sits, and they enter the vendor conversation knowing what they want to solve.
   

3. They assign an owner for adoption after go-live. This is usually a director-level person with budget authority and an opinion. They make the internal case before the project, hold to the new process during rollout, and keep the old workflows from creeping back in at month six.
   

The grocer in this case had all three. Six months after their first DC went live, they were running six distribution centers on a system that no longer needed a caller role to function. The technology they used was C3 Hive. What made it work was that they understood, before they signed the contract, what they were actually buying: a measurably cheaper way to run inbound.