A Look at How Loblaw and EAIGLE Are Bringing Automated Gates to a National Distribution Network

Loblaw Companies, Canada’s largest food retailer with roughly CA$61 billion in annual revenue, has been running automated gate technology at what its transportation team describes as the flagship facility for its entire network, and the reason that designation matters is that the site was built to absorb a set of innovative projects rather than to run a proven playbook, which makes both the performance numbers and the failure modes unusually instructive for any operations leader scoping similar work.

Heather Fallo, senior manager of transportation at the facility, said the automated gate is one of the transportation team’s key initiatives at a site designed to represent where the company is headed. The volume justifies the attention. Roughly 400 trailers move in and 400 move out every day. Inbound processing runs about three seconds.

Outbound runs about four. At a conventional distribution centre with a guard in a booth, Fallo put the equivalent at anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes per truck. On September 16, Loblaw and EAIGLE announced they were expanding the partnership across multiple yards and distribution centres.

EAIGLE, based in Markham, Ontario, markets the platform as AVAC. Wael Yehia, Loblaw’s vice president of national transportation, framed the work in terms of practical improvements to how products move through the network.

EAIGLE chief executive Amir Hoss characterized it as scaling something already proven in live operations rather than as a pilot, and positioned the technology as reinforcing existing workflows rather than replacing them. A site walkthrough fills in what a press release cannot.

Seven or Eight API Calls Before the Gate Opens Every transaction triggers seven or eight API calls across separate systems. Hoss listed them: Manhattan Active, SAP, a supply chain hub layer, Blue Yonder, TruckMate, C3 Solutions for appointments, and Setaris for mechanical records, among others.

Steve Freas, director of transportation systems, walked through the inbound sequence. The supply chain hub validates what is inside the trailer, the transaction moves through to yard management, which verifies the trailer and its contents, and staff inside get a live picture of what is on site.

Paperwork goes in, the trailer is checked into the yard management system, its position is recorded, and shunt tasks are kicked off automatically. The driver population splits along a line that shapes the design. Loblaw’s own fleet drivers, about 30 to 40 percent of traffic, use an in-house application that generates a QR code instantly.

The remaining 60 to 65 percent arrive from carriers using the third-party web application. A driver can complete the transaction three ways: on a phone, on the kiosk touchscreen, or on an in-cab tablet from Samsara, Isaac, GeoTab or Platform Science.

Hoss said this site was chosen to demonstrate because it is unusually well integrated, and represents where a lot of customers are trying to get within two years. Exception Handling Runs Remotely No automated gate clears every truck, and the design question is what happens to the ones it does not.

Exception handling at this site runs from inside the building rather than from a booth. Fallo described a panel of monitors on her office wall connected to cameras facing the inbound and outbound gates, letting her team watch trucks approach the lane, confirm the booms are operating, and manage flow.

A driver who cannot complete a transaction presses a help button on the kiosk to reach the office, and her team can also call the kiosk directly. If the driver still cannot get through, an operator can enter the information on their behalf, which preserves data accuracy rather than leaving a gap in the record.

Hoss noted that other sites configure this differently, running a rework workflow where a failed driver is given roughly 20 seconds to exit the lane before an alert fires. The workflow is configurable by carrier, by load type, by lane and by site. The categories that generate exceptions are worth understanding at the design stage.

Optical character recognition depends on the interaction between what a driver keys in, what the camera reads, and what the yard management system already holds, so a discrepancy in any of the three surfaces at the gate.

Trailer chain of custody is its own category: Freas noted Loblaw runs roughly 4,000 trailers nationally and carriers swap them in and out routinely, so a trailer dropped by one carrier and retrieved by another has to be reconciled. On the inbound side, appointment timing drives most of it, with tolerance configurable by carrier.

None of those are camera problems. They are data problems, and an automated gate does not create them so much as surface them at the moment a truck is sitting in the lane waiting.

That visibility is useful, and it is also the reason the exception desk needs to be staffed as a real function rather than treated as a rounding error against the labor the automation displaces.