Stuck in Nashville with the Memphis Blues Again
Birmingham-Nashville Express (BNE) is a midsize transportation company with a fleet of 80 trucks, 65 of which are big rigs that make deliveries throughout the eastern United States. Rick Osgood, CFO of the Nashville-based company, says that he thought he would have to put in a wireless system when his customers started demanding to know where their freight was in real time. In fact, the customers never did, but when BNE had to replace its fleet management system for Y2K, it bought a system that was wireless compatible.At first BNE used its old tracking and management method with the new system. Every day, drivers would phone in their location between 8 and 9 in the morning, and again between 4 and 5 in the afternoon. "Unless we had a problem, we didn't hear from them at any other time," says Osgood. If, for example, a driver was on his way to Chicago and "we heard he was in Bowling Green in the morning, we'd figure he'd make it by mid afternoon". They did - mostly. But Osgood recalls lots of times when he'd tell a customer a delivery was on its way and he really didn't know. "It's disconcerting," he says. "You have to hope you're right."
Two things would happen when drivers checked in: 1. they would lose drive time; 2. they would either have short conversations or leave messages with overwhelmed fleet managers who rarely captured everything.
Between December 1999 and March 2000, after upgrading the management system, BNE installed a satellite-based fleet tracking system from Aether Systems for an initial cost of $US15,000 plus $US2000 per truck. With training, that added up to $US150,000. The system let BNE capture real-time location information about its fleet, and saved the drivers stop time. Mobile phones would have also saved time - and cost less - but many drivers still would have been forced to leave messages. And always-connected mobile devices don't have the range that truckers need.
Osgood reports that the investment has produced an immediate return. Excluding freight rate hikes, revenue per truck per day has increased from 7 per cent to 10 per cent, he says. That adds up fast, and Osgood says that the increased truck revenue has already led to a 115 per cent ROI, approximately $US175,000. That doesn't even take into account increased efficiency at the home office. BNE no longer needs staff to answer phone calls from drivers and check voice mails, and Osgood says that those managers have been reassigned. The additional location information also leads to better customer service, allowing Osgood a measure of peace of mind when people ask him where their cargo is.
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