Pennsylvania LTL Relies On Software Running in California
Ward Trucking, Altoona, Pa., serves the Northeast U.S. with more than 425 trucks from 20 terminals. Ward is a traditional LTL that has been in business since the 1931. The company uses a pickup and delivery ASP from Cheetah Systems Inc., Westlake Village, Calif.
Greg Confer, Ward's director of process analysis and improvement, was given the job of automating Ward's manual dispatch system more than a year ago. Cost was a restraint, he said, and so was the company's IT shop of fewer than 20 people handling Ward's AS/400 and Windows XP/2000 back office computing systems.
"We looked at about 20 different vendors and I went through a bunch of demonstrations. When I saw (Cheetah's) interface, the GUI (Graphic User Interface), the ease of use, the no-nonsense approach to it, I said this is what we want," Confer said.
"But Cheetah runs on a Unix system and we didn't have any Unix expertise. We didn't want to have to bring in that additional grief of adding Unix staff here to support the box and the maintenance and have a Unix developer. Also there's the initial upfront cost of buying the hardware. It was a better financial decision for us to go to the ASP model."
Ward's pickup and delivery system runs on a Cheetah server across the country in California, but an important piece of the system runs locally, on the Nextel phones Ward drivers use to communicate with the system.
"Using Nextel telephones, we're able to have the drivers download their delivery routes for the day and any pickups we know about before they leave for the street. Then they use the telephone that has GPS tracking in it to record when they've made delivery to a customer - in and out times. The customer's name is keyed into the telephone. Any delivery exceptions are entered, and throughout the day as we have pickups called in from our customers, they're transmitted electronically to the driver's telephone. The driver's phone rings and says, pick up at ABC."
Cheetah software in the driver phones continues to operate even when the phone itself is beyond Nextel data service.
"They can continue to do their deliveries. The information doesn't get transmitted until they come back into coverage. But behind the scenes, there's nothing the driver has to do. It just automatically does this.
"Any pickups they have, of course, we can't transmit them because they're out of coverage. I'm talking about a handful of drivers across our system. If they know they're going to leave coverage for an extended period of time - and they know where they have coverage and don't - then they'll call in beforehand and say, 'Hey make sure, do I have any pick ups called in yet?' "
The Cheetah ASP works for Ward at both ends of the system.
"It's easy to use for our dispatchers. It didn't take much to train them. That made all the difference," Confer said.
Initial implementation took fewer than 60 days from the time the contract was signed. According to Confer, six months into the contract, Ward is about to recoup the return on minimal investment. Some non-ASP systems, he said, would have cost 10 times as much.
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