Cross-dock and yard visibility on a live map: dock doors, trailers and gates

A cross-dock lives or dies on flow. A trailer arrives at the gate, crosses the weighbridge, waits in a yard slot, is pulled to a door by a yard tractor and unloads onto sortation lanes — and the freight leaves through another door a few hours later. Every step is recorded somewhere: the gate log, the yard spreadsheet, the dock schedule, the WMS, the telematics portal. Almost none of those systems show where things are in relation to each other.

So the shift lead asks the radio. Which doors are free? Which trailer has been sitting in row C since this morning? Why is the inbound gate backed up? A live map of the building and the yard turns those questions into something you read at a glance. It doesn’t replace your yard or transport system — it puts their data on the site plan, so everyone looks at the same picture.

The middle column names five of Eastport’s 24 tables.

Everything starts with the site plan. Place it in the editor — a PDF is scaled from its sheet size, a DWG is rendered as a picture, or use a PNG or JPG — and it sits at true scale on a real-world basemap, so the yard, gate lanes and access roads line up with the building. Eastport is a single floor, 01-site-plan, that holds both the cross-dock building and the yard around it.

• Areas for each dock door, yard slot, gate lane, weighbridge, parking bay, wash bay, fuel island and the workshop, each with an optional role from a list you edit in the facility settings (for example Dock door, Yard slot, Gate lane).
• Sortation lanes as areas inside the building, so pallet counts and status can colour them.
• Walls and doors for the building shell. Doors snap to walls and let walking routes through — see the Door tool.
• Markers for fixed equipment: gate readers, cameras, sensors, fire points.
• 3D models of trucks, trailers and forklifts from the model library or your own .glb files — see 3D models.

A truck model at the dock doors (shown on Acme Warehouse)

A dock door has a small, well-defined state: free, assigned, loading or unloading, done. Keep the turns in a table — Eastport’s is called Dock Turns — with a field for each thing the dock cares about, for example `door`, `status`, `trailer` and `turn_started`. Then add a Color a shape data link that attaches each row to its door area by name, tick a few style rules, and the doors repaint as the rows change.

Attach to shapes: match each record to its shape by name

The screenshot matches a `room_name` field; for doors you would pick `door` instead. Two more display modes help at the door. Value badge on shape prints a number on each door — trailers turned today, or minutes since the turn started if your system sends it. Pulsing zone activity puts an animated ring and count on a busy door. On the Eastport map, door markers read “Closed” or “Held open 14 min” straight from their data.

At Crestline Fulfillment Center the same idea joins the dock to the warehouse. Numbered dock doors (D01, D02 … D21) line two walls, inbound and outbound staging lanes sit between the doors and the racks, and the Staged Pallets and Trailer Visits tables feed the Docks & Trailer Yard report — so inbound freight and stock show up on the same map.

Crestline Fulfillment Center: dock doors, staging lanes and racks

Each yard slot is an area, and each slot has a row in a table such as Eastport’s Yard Slots: which trailer is in it, its status and — if you want to see dwell — a number for how long it has been there. A Color a shape link tints the slots, and the tooltip and content panel show the trailer, its reference and any other field you choose.

Style rules are tried from the lowest priority number up, and the first rule that matches paints the slot. Put the most urgent condition first:

A trailer that has sat in its slot for five hours matches the first rule and paints red; the occupied rule never gets a turn. Swap the order and every occupied slot paints blue, whatever its dwell. A rule can also set a label template such as `{trailer}` or `{minutes_in_slot} min`, so the number is readable on the slot itself. See style rules.

curl -X PATCH https://app.spatialmap.io/api/v1/public/tables/rows/C-14 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPATIALMAP_TABLE_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"status": "occupied", "trailer": "TR-4471", "minutes_in_slot": 185}'

A `PATCH` merges only the fields you send, so a script that recalculates dwell every few minutes can update one number without touching the rest of the row. The table write API also takes bulk upserts of up to 1,000 rows in one call.

Every arrival and departure passes the gate. Eastport logs them in Gate Transactions and reports on them in Gate & Weighbridges. On the map, gate lanes and weighbridges are areas: colour them by lane status, or show a Value badge on shape with today’s count.

Yard tractors move trailers between slots and doors. If your telematics can send positions into a table or expose them over REST, each tractor becomes a Live location marker at its longitude and latitude. The Eastport screenshot shows tractors labelled YT-01 to YT-06, and a label can carry any field — one reads “YT-03 · fuel 9%”. Their moves are logged in Tractor Moves and summarised in the Yard Tractors report.

To see where a tractor has been, set a data link on the table to Historical movement: the viewer gets a History player at the bottom of the map that replays the table’s recorded changes. See row history and the History player.

• Parking — truck and car bays as areas, coloured occupied or free. Eastport report: Parking.
• Washes, fuel and the workshop — bays and islands coloured by status, with the vehicle in each shown in the tooltip. Eastport report: Washes, Fuel & Workshop.
• Site sensors — markers labelled with their live reading, with uptime in the record. Eastport report: Site Sensors.

Inside the building, the question changes from “where is the trailer?” to “where is the freight?”. At Eastport, RFID tags on pallets are read as they move through the cross-dock, the transfers land in the Pallet Transfers table, and the Cross-Dock Flow report follows them through the sortation lanes. On the map, colour each lane by pallets waiting, or put a value badge with the count on it, so a lane that is filling up stands out.

Forklifts and crews carry BLE tags. Whatever your RTLS calls them, the map needs one row per tag with a position: a Live location marker link draws them, clustering keeps a busy dock readable, and Heatmap of activity turns positions into a density map that shows where congestion builds up near the doors. The live markers recipe walks through the setup.

The nine display modes in the New data link dialog

“Map the state, not the event log: one row per door, slot and lane, kept current, is something a shift lead reads at a glance.”

There are no vendor connectors to wait for. Anything that can send or serve JSON, or export a file, can feed the map:

• Tables with a write API — one table per stream (doors, slots, gate transactions, positions) and one API key per system. Rows are keyed by your own ID, such as a door or slot name, and open maps update without a refresh.
• REST pull — a table can call your yard or transport system’s endpoint on a schedule from our servers, so it keeps going with no map open. An Integrations REST source is pulled by the browser while a map is open.
• File upload — CSV, XLSX, JSON or GeoJSON for slow-changing data such as the slot list or a carrier roster.

1. 1
   Create the tables

   Tables → Create new table. Use Polygon / area for doors, slots and lanes; Asset (mobile) for tractors, forklifts and crews; Sensor for site sensors; Shipment or RFID tag where they fit.

2. 2
   Feed them

   Give each system its own key on the API & access tab, or switch on Pull from a REST API.

3. 3
   Link them to the map

   In the editor, Data → Manage data links → New link: pick the table, the display mode, the shapes it attaches to and the floor scope.

4. 4
   Style and group

   Tick style rules on each link, choose the tooltip fields, then group the site, its reports and its tables into a solution.

For the integration side in depth — polling, pushing and keys — read the WMS integration guide and the scheduled REST polling recipe.

Every facility gets 8 built-in reports about what is drawn on its map, and every table you link gets a live report of its own. On top of those, Eastport has a report per area of the site: Trailer Yard, Dock Doors, Gate & Weighbridges, Yard Tractors, Cross-Dock Flow, Parking, Washes, Fuel & Workshop and Site Sensors.

Build your own in the report builder. A Summary report gives KPI cards and charts — doors in use, trailers in the yard, gate transactions today. A Detail report lists records with filters and sort. An Editable report lets the yard team correct a slot in place. A History report charts a timestamp field over a rolling window, such as gate transactions per hour. Switch any of them to a full-map report and the list floats over the live site plan.

A full-map report (shown on Retail Mart Store)

Reports can be filtered, starred and exported to PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON. For a step-by-step build, see warehouse KPI dashboards with a live 3D map.

Some people need the view but not the editor: a haulier’s dispatcher, the security contractor at the gate, an auditor. Give each a read-only share link limited to the layers they should see, with an expiry and a view cap, and revoke it from Manage links when the job ends.

A first version fits in an afternoon: place the site plan, draw the doors and the yard slots, and connect one table — usually door status or slot occupancy. Add gates, tractors, pallets and crews as each system comes on board, then group everything in a solution.

See the bigger picture on the Logistics solution page, walk through Eastport and Crestline (also part of the Inventory solution), and read the display modes guide before you build your first layer.

Start a 7-day free trial with no credit card; the trial holds up to 5 facilities. After that, Pro is $60/month or $600/year for up to 4 facilities — see pricing.