Trucking companies have come a long way from T-cards and pay phones.
Matt Herndon, vice president of operations at PAM Transport in Tontitown, remembers using the cards in dispatch to keep track of trucks’ departure, cargo and arrival schedules. Such an antiquated system would never work in this day and age, not with PAM having 1,600 or more trucks on the nation’s roads at any one time.
“You just had slots and a board on the wall, and you wrote everything,” Herndon said. “You had a daily check call from a driver: ‘I’m in Sullivan, Missouri; everything is fine.’”
Last week, Herndon stood in a large room filled with several dozen managers keeping track of those 1,600 trucks. A map of the United States appeared on a large screen showing colored dots that represented a PAM “asset,” as the vehicles are called by trucking executives.
Each asset has an in-cab mobile device that allows Herndon or a driver manager to pinpoint the exact location of a specific truck. As winter weather threatened, Herndon said the asset map could be combined with a weather map so officials can quickly ascertain which assets are likely to be affected by storms.
His administrative assistant, Morgan Phipps, is tasked each morning with collecting a weather report and having that sent out in a fleetwide message to all drivers to alert them of possible weather complications. Herndon said the technology helped the company plan around some winter weather that threatened to stop traffic near Bowling Green, Kentucky.
“You can see all of our trucks and where they’re heading into weather,” Herndon said. “That’s where operationally we can see what direction they’re going and what they’re moving into. We can study the big weather patterns, and we alert our drivers.”
Herndon said the technology allows the company to send direct messages to every truck nationally or to every truck in a specific region or even an individual truck, and it also allows truckers to contact the company from the road. Not unlike the old CB days when an eastbound trucker would relay weather and road information to a westbound colleague, truck drivers act as a company’s eyes and ears.
“More than anything, in the communication between our fleet and back to our DMs, we get more real weather,” Herndon said. “We share that internally. We have 1,600 weather guys out there seeing real data.”
Wal-Mart Meteorologists
Weather is a constant concern even to the world’s largest retailer. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which employs its own meteorologists, tries to plan ahead to avoid complications and relies on good communication between the in-cab driver and in-office manager.
“We’d be bigger than we are if we could predict the weather better than the weatherman ahead of time,” joked Elizabeth Fretheim, Wal-Mart’s director of business strategy and sustainability for logistics.
Modern technology involves much more than weather, of course.
Trucking companies such as PAM, USA Truck of Van Buren and Maverick Transportation of North Little Rock have on-board recording of individual trucks’ operations.
Wal-Mart’s trucking division uses driving data to improve efficiency and, as Fretheim pointed out, when you drive 700 million miles a year, even a 1 percent reduction in cost is significant.
It’s not Big Brother monitoring to see if a driver is speeding but a performance-optimization tool to save time and money — especially fuel costs. Maverick, for instance, allows its drivers to access their driving data so they can review the information — an assist to the drivers since Maverick awards performance bonuses for miles-per-gallon and delivery achievements.
“You can put all kind of fancy technologies out there, but if you’re not using them in the most optimal way, you’re not going to get the benefits you’re looking for,” Fretheim said. “There’s a lot of focus on that driver technique piece because trucks are becoming more and more sophisticated.”
Companies want their drivers to limit off-route driving, too much idling and, above all, poor mpg performance. On-board recording allows companies to keep track of those important metrics.
USA Truck spent millions replacing its on-board systems in the past year with a system called PeopleNet. Chris Rhodes, the company’s vice president of Information Technology, said USA Truck has a program that instructs drivers of an optimal route, including where to stop for breaks and how many gallons of fuel to take in at which truck stop.
The up-front costs of implementing the system were significant, Rhodes said, but fuel savings have increased each of the last four quarters and customer satisfaction has improved.
“We’ve increased substantially in the last 12 months in customer service in on-time pick up and on-time delivery,” Rhodes said. “It’s better and better every month. It is making us so much more efficient than we were just 12 months ago.”
Wayne Brown, Maverick’s vice president of IT, said the company maps out optimal routes but lets the individual drivers have the “flexibility” of when and where to stop for fuel and breaks.
“Parking is a huge deal,” Brown said. “We’re trying to crack that nut as far as trying to give a guy a trip plan that includes just about everything he needs to do. Drivers need flexibility. Drivers need and want that. They want you to tell them how to trip plan effectively.”
Advanced Communication
Today’s tractors are much more advanced than your grandfather’s diesel. Most are outfitted not just with the in-cab messaging center but with electrical outlets and USB ports.
When a truck breaks down on the side of the road, the driver is likely not going to be able to fix the computerized engine with a wrench and elbow grease but, because of the in-cab connection, help is a send message away.
“Those days of finding a phone in the cold or walking a half-mile to the next ramp are over,” Rhodes said.
Brown said Maverick’s 2015 model tractors, which represent about 300 of the company’s 1,500 assets, have front-facing cameras in addition to recording the operations of the truck. Brown said the cameras can be used for training purposes to review incidents.
Brown said Maverick also uses a technology program that allows managers to do what they can to ensure drivers get home each weekend. It’s hard to overstate how important this is to many of the drivers, and Brown said the program’s mapping tool shows which drivers could have routes “swapped” with other drivers to get them home.
Brown said Maverick has a 90 percent success rate in having its drivers home each weekend.
“It’s all about the driver en-gagement piece, not just safe and efficient but satisfied so we can retain them,” Brown said. “Home time is a big piece of that.”
Herndon said technology helps with customer service and is also a huge benefit for the drivers. So many trucking companies are scratching to attract and retain every driver they can, and technology can help.
“It’s how can we benefit our drivers because, as much as customers are very, very important to us, drivers are our biggest commodity operationally,” Herndon said. “We can give them the tools they need to make their jobs easier.”
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