Every dock has a board somewhere: a whiteboard by the shipping office, a printout taped to the wall, a tab in somebody's spreadsheet. It answers the question the whole building asks all day — which doors are free, which are loading, which are done and waiting for a driver. This page gives you a clean version of that board, as a printable grid for the whiteboard and as an Excel sheet with the colours and counts built in.

01What goes on the board

The board is a grid: doors down the side, and for each door the state it is in right now plus just enough detail to act on it. Here is what a slice of it looks like filled in:

The Excel version adds four more columns you will want by the second week: Reference (PO or appointment), Since (when the door went into this status, so you can see a door that has been LOADING for three hours), Owner, and Notes. A summary under the grid counts doors by status and flags any door that has a status other than EMPTY but no trailer number, which is the most common way a board quietly goes wrong.

02The four statuses, and why only four

• EMPTY. The door is free and can take a trailer now. Grey, so it visually disappears and the eye lands on the doors with something happening.
• LOADING. A trailer is at the door and work is in progress. Use it for unloading too; the board does not need to know the direction to know the door is busy. The In/Out column carries that.
• LOADED. Work is finished and the trailer is waiting to be pulled. This is the status that costs money when it sits: a LOADED door is a door you cannot use and a trailer that is not moving.
• BLOCKED. The door cannot be used: leveler down, trailer with a damage hold, door reserved for a specific inbound. Red, with the reason in notes.

Boards with eight statuses end up with the same three used and the rest stale. Four states that everyone updates beat twelve that nobody does.

03How to run it

1. List the doors in physical order. Door 1 at the top if door 1 is at the north end. The board should read the way the building does, so a new hire can find a door from the board without asking.
2. Update the row when the door changes, not at the end of the shift. The board is only useful if it is current. A board updated hourly is a history, not a status.
3. Always write the trailer number. A door marked LOADING with no trailer number tells the yard nothing. The Excel sheet highlights that cell blue until it is filled.
4. Put a name on every busy door. The owner is whoever will change the status next: the lead on the load, or the yard driver who will pull it. Doors with no owner stay LOADING all day.
5. Read the summary at every huddle. Empty, loading, loaded, blocked. If LOADED is high, the yard is behind on pulls. If BLOCKED is high, maintenance is. Those two numbers tell you where the afternoon is going.

04Whiteboard or sheet?

The whiteboard wins on one thing: anyone walking past can see it and change it, no login. That matters on a dock. It loses on everything else: only one copy exists, it does not keep history, and it does not know what is in the yard behind the doors. The printed grid below is for the whiteboard version — laminate it and use a marker or magnets in the status columns.

The sheet keeps history (a LOADED door that sat for two hours is visible later), can be seen from the office, and the counts calculate themselves. It loses if it lives on a computer nobody on the dock can reach. Many yards run both: the whiteboard on the floor, the sheet in the office, and a person who reconciles them, which is the job that eventually gets replaced by software.

05Printable door grid

This is what prints when you press the button above: one page, 24 doors, tick or magnet the status column. The Excel Print Grid tab has 40.

When you outgrow the sheet

The board only knows about the doors. The reason a LOADED door sits is usually in the yard: the driver who will pull it is on the other side of the lot, or the empty that should replace it is in a spot nobody wrote down. Vantage puts door status next to the yard list and the gate log on the same phone, so the person who changes a door's status is the person standing at it, and the office sees it at the same moment. If the whiteboard and the sheet are keeping up, keep them. If you have a person whose job is reconciling the two, that is the signal.

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