ALPR gate automation at OWM Logistics

The client

OWM Logistics is a third-party logistics provider headquartered in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, operating warehouses at Jamshedpur and Kolkata and serving steel plants across the region. Their operation is vehicle-dense: inbound trailers, warehouse loading, and outbound movement to plant gates run continuously.

OWM already runs a mature digital estate — a set of applications they call the Digital Cockpit, covering indents, tracking, warehouse and transport management. The gate was the one place still running on paper.

The problem

Every vehicle event began as handwriting. A guard recorded the number plate and time in a register; hours later somebody keyed a subset of it into a system. Four consequences followed, and OWM could name all of them before we arrived:

• Turnaround time was an opinion. Arrival and departure timestamps came from memory and goodwill, so TAT could not be measured, let alone improved.
• Detention claims were unwinnable. With no machine-stamped arrival, disputes with transporters came down to whose register was more legible.
• Plate numbers did not reconcile. Handwritten plates were transposed or misread, so vehicle movement could not be tied reliably to the indent it belonged to.
• Nobody knew what was on site. A live count of vehicles inside the premises required a walk around the yard.

What we did

We ran a lane-by-lane survey first, because plate reading is decided by geometry and light long before it is decided by software. That survey changed two camera positions and added illumination on one lane — the cheapest work in the project and the reason the read rate held up at night.

We then deployed ALPR capture across the gates, matched each read against the trip and indent OWM was already expecting in their own system, and posted the resulting gate event directly into the Digital Cockpit. Crucially, we did not build a parallel gate register: the existing vehicle-in and vehicle-out events in their platform became the single record, now machine-populated.

Unreadable and unexpected plates were the part we spent most design time on. They go to a supervisor queue with the captured photograph for one-tap correction, and the correction is retained — so the exception rate itself became a reportable number rather than an invisible manual workaround.

The outcome

The change OWM values most is not a percentage. It is that the gate stopped being the weakest link in their data. Arrival and departure are now machine-stamped facts, which means turnaround time is measured rather than estimated, and detention conversations reference a timestamped photograph instead of a register.

Because the events land in the platform they already used, the benefit reached their existing reports on day one — the vehicle-in, load-start and load-finish reports they distribute to warehouse and plant teams became reliable without anyone changing how they receive them.

Where it goes next

Two extensions are in discussion: pairing the plate read with the weighbridge ticket so gross, tare and net attach to the right vehicle automatically, and running driver and vehicle compliance checks through Dynamic Forms at the same gate, so a failed check can hold the barrier rather than being discovered later.