If you're adding new systems, but not taking the time to integrate them, you're not gaining as much as you may think.

Despite the technology age, many trucking companies are still awash in paper. Paperwork is eating away at productivity.

 "There is a lot of paper flow in the truck business, and a lot of people are still touching the same piece of paper." Said Kym Moulton , vice-president of ASCAR Business Systems, Glendale, California.

 That was the case with Four SeasonsProduce Co., Denver, Pa. This full-service produce company was facing paper-based routines for routing and picking orders from the warehouse. Four Seasons delivers fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the Mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia. Its customers are primarily retail grocery stores, wholesale warehouses and institutional customers, such as schools, hospitals and restaurants.

 Until just a few years ago, putting together routes was a time-intensive operation for routing manager Chris Shirk. While back-office operations, such as accounting and order-taking, used the latest technology, in the routing department shirk was still doing everything manually.

 "I had a 15-foot table. On it I put the pick tickets I had printed from the main order system and a typed list of potential stops that I used as a master route guide. I would take the orders and arrange them on the table in the order they would be loaded into the truck." He had no way of knowing when he might "cube" out a truck, except by making rough estimates based on the package count per order.

 "It was a hit-and miss type of thing and we had no way of telling our customers what time they could expect their order. On a heavy night, it would take me three to four hours to route."

 A few years ago the company installed routing software from Roadshow international (recently acquired by Descartes Systems Group, Waterloo, Ontario.) "With Roadshow, the same number of routes would take me 15 minutes." Shirk said.

 Four Seasons has doubled its business over the last five years and has also doubled its fleet to 11 22-foot straight trucks and 29 tractor-trailer combinations. The company employs 43 full-time drivers and another 15 part-time drivers who make weekend runs.

 The fleet runs between 28 and 30 routes on the "light nights," and as many as 38 on Thursday and Friday. Many of the routes are within a 100-mile radius of Four Season's headquarters with local routes (within 50 miles) covering the towns of Reading, Lancaster and Harrisburg. The longest route is to the company's facility in Charlottesville, VA., a 520-mile round trip.

 "That truck leaves around midnight and doesn't get back here till about 1:00 or 2:00 the next morning. The shortest route is a local route in the Lancaster area that leaves at 5:00 in the morning and gets back around 11:00 a.m."

 In Some ways the company's remarkable growth was aided by the increased productivity and efficiency achieved via the routing and warehousing systems the company installed.

 The Roadshow system uses specific information on the truck fleet - body size, trailer lengths, gross, vehicle weight, etc, combined with the local road system, road conditions and customer data to generate the most effective routes. The system employs Roadshow's QuickMaps technology to illustrate customer locations and routes directly on the route manager's computer screen.

 In Four Season's case, routing and warehousing systems were integrated with the company's IBM RISC 6000 mainframe.

 "The sales people enter their orders on the main system," Shirk said. "In that system, we have the information we need for Roadshow attached to the order. We download that information from the RISC system to print stickers for each box of product with customer number, route number and stop sequence."

 Data is input only once in this process: when the orders are taken. That information is used to build the routes, and then the route information is used to print loading information and pick tickets for the warehouse.

 In the warehouse, the company uses a labor management system that has greatly improved efficiency, according to Shirk. "Each product has its own slot in the warehouse," Shirk explained. "The system takes the orders and breaks them down into skid lots. Selectors take and assignment (one pallet of product) and select it. The selectors are routed through the warehouse according to how the needed products are slotted. We've been able to manage the labor much more effectively and also route the loading process through the warehouse.

 "Before, it was like New York City on a Friday morning with pallet jacks going in every direction." The warehouse system enabled the company to reduce the number of order fillers by about 30 percent according to Shirk.

 Four Seasons Began under a different name in 1976 as a "mom-and -pop operation that ran one little truck down to the Philadelphia Terminal market where they would buy produce," Shirk said. David Hollinger bought the company with "a vision of building a full-service produce company."

Despite the technology age, many trucking companies are still awash in paper.
 The company now employs over 350 people between its operations in Denver, Pa., and Charlottesville, Va., and the Four Seasons Trading Co. in McAllen, Texas which imports fruits and vegetables from Mexico.

 According to Shirk, the company hopes to 'double again in the next five years," and he thinks his Roadshow package will handle such growth. "We have a license for 100 routes now, I may have to get a larger hard drive to accommodate the maps we may need as the company is looking to go into Ohio and Michigan.

 Shirk noted the Roadshow package can be augmented with options his company decided to pass on, including vehicle tracking via on-board devices. On-board computers might be something they would consider "in the future," he said.

Freight Forwarding

Where Four Seasons gained efficiency by incorporating distribution-specific systems into their operations, other companies seek solutions at the dispatching end of the operation.

 That was the strategy taken by Beaman and Lassiter, a freight forwarding operation based in Virginia Beach, Va. The company installed ASCAR 's Truck-Pak system.

 Truck-Pak includes automated job-ticket writing, shipper and consignee information logging, paperless dispatching instantaneous rating and invoicing, bookkeeping and payroll functions.

 An integrated system offers a number of advantages, according to systems administrator Terry Heck. "It makes it much easier to track down errors when everything is in one place," Hech said. Before installing the ASCARsystem, only the accounting function was computerized, according to heck.

 Systems such as the Truck-Pak reduce the paper flow by "crating a corporate consciousness - an entity that knows what's going on in all parts of the company and everyone can access this entity," via their computer terminal according to ASCAR's Moulton.

 That means that if someone in accounting has a dispatching question, they can bring it up on their computer screen rather than having to track down the right person in dispatch. This makes everyone in the company more efficient.

 The ASCAR system also includes a wireless communication function that allows dispatchers to communicate to trucks in the field via a number of devices.

 Beaman and Lassiter use alpha-numeric pagers to send messages to drivers in the field. Other options include two-way paging units and in-cab computers. According to Moulton, in-cab units are the least popular option among their customers, , which include express delivery companies, pickup and delivery concerns and air freight and freight-forwarding operations.

 Even with just an alpha-number pager, the automated dispatching system reduces the amount of taking a dispatcher must do each day by 50%, according to Moulton. "That makes the dispatcher 50% more efficient."

 

More options available

 Systems such as Roadshow and Truk-Pak represent only two of the many packages available that help fleet and operations managers move toward a "paperless" operation. Other packages offer maintenance and shop management while still others offer fully integrated systems that include hardware and software. The key ingredient, of course, is to understand what your company needs are now and what they will be in the future