Taking E-Commerce To The Web
Outsourcing customer tracking and tracing.
JOHN BENDEL
TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
Mill Creek Motor Freight has a company web site, but the Canada-based commercial fleet has outsourced a critical e-commerce element — customer tracking and tracing.
"With the constant threat of viruses and hacking, for me not to have to worry about that is a big deal," said Eric Ness, Mill Creek's information technology manager.
Ness said drivers and customers can find information about Mill Creek at the web site hosted on the company's own servers. But Mill Creek customers access more important tracking data through a third-party technology provider.
Mill Creek Motor Freight is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mullen Transportation, Inc. based in Alberta, Canada. Mill Creek is headquartered in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.
"We are Mullen's biggest van operation. Between our Canadian office and our U.S. office in Holland, Mich., we have about 350 trucks, about half of them owner-operators," Ness explained.
"We provide air-ride van service to all of Canada and the continental U.S. Through partnerships with several Mexican carriers, we have freight-forwarding into and out of Mexico. We pull a lot of freight through Laredo, Texas," he said.
Mill Creek Motor Freight could be described as a truckload carrier yet, LTL represents about 40% of its business. Ness explained the company hauls and delivers whatever its customers ask — right down to a single pallet. The company can consolidate freight at its three terminals in Ontario, Michigan and Texas where trailers can be loaded to ride with as many as 40 stops, he said. Mill Creek's customers include blue chip companies like IBM and Rockwell.
Ness said he decided to outsource customer tracking in August of last year when he was installing Mill Creek's new enterprise software system, TruckMate for Windows from Maddocks Systems, Inc.
Ness chose eShip, a transportation technology company started by Steve Kessler in 1998. Mill Creek's eShip tracking site was launched in September.
"Maddocks didn't have an online, web-based tracking system up and running at the time. I knew eShip from working with Steve Kessler on other projects and it was ready made. We could integrate it into Maddocks very easily through simple extraction. And he (Kessler) provided the security, the web site, the bandwidth. Everything we needed was already set up," Ness explained.
"The implementation was really quick. That was a big thing for us. We didn't have to develop the web site. We didn't have to write code."
But the primary issue was security for the critical information that passed through the site to customers. Mill Creek's trucks are equipped with Qualcomm's OmniTRACS mobile communications and location systems.
"That's integrated into the Maddocks system, which is in turn exported to eShip and displayed. Almost as soon as we're updated from Qualcomm the eShip system is updated. It's within 15 minutes," said Ness.
The information is on a secure eShip server, but a customer might not notice. In order to access tracking information a customer selects the "load tracking" option on Mill Creek's own web site. That brings up a log-on page that carries the eShip logo along with Mill Creek's. There the customer enters a user name and password to track individual shipments.
Ness explained that the entire system is automated. Data exported from the Maddocks system updates the database "so customers can track shipments in something close to real time," he said.
"Qualcomm, the way we have it set up, updates every hour. So the customer's seeing the data almost as soon as we are."
Ness said that a handful of customers track shipments all the time.
"But the majority of our customers are looking at their hot loads. They want to know when this important shipment is going to arrive. They'll track it all day long and all night long. And they let me know when something's wrong," he said.
Ness explained that sometimes a shipment does not show up on the eShip system and a worried customer will want to know why. Most of the time, he said, it's because of an operational error, a load not properly entered into the system. The actual shipment is usually where it should be and moving.
"I'll look on the system I can track independently. Oh, the truck's right here; the trip just wasn't created. I'll call dispatch. It'll show up and it will have all the information on there within the hour usually," said Ness.
Maddocks Systems, Mill Creek's enterprise software provider, now offers web integration but Ness plans to stay with eShip.
"Like I said about the security of the web-based stuff; that's a big deal right now. I'm in the middle of a lot of other things and I don't have time to deal with setting up a web server, doing the security, worrying about that. Not that we couldn't do it, just not right now."
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