Roberts Rules the Road

The king is dead. well, almost dead.

He's certainly on the verge of a heart attack.

It's Friday morning at the Roberts Express call center in Akron, Ohio. Emergency-shipment orders are streaming in over the phones. A couple of hundred dispatchers are typing away on PCs. Powerful software is locating trucks by satellite. The clock is racing. And dispatcher Bill Vasilatos - aka the King - is entrenched on the front lines. Wearing a telephone headset, he scans the dispatch board, trying to match trucks with shipments between New York and Philadelphia - shipments that have to be picked up almost immediately.

But Fridays being Fridays, and this being Friday the 13th, nothing comes easy. According to the computer, Brooklyn is experiencing "low power." Translation: not enough trucks. In a wry, bemused voice, as if he can't quite believe it, the usually unflappable Vasilatos confides, "I'm getting killed."

Talk about a fast company. Roberts Express, the largest "expedited freight carrier" in North America, delivers the goods nonstop, door-to-door, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Think next-day service is fast? More than half of Roberts's shipments arrive on the same day. "We're the ambulance service for industrial freight," says Joe Greulich, manager of management information systems. He's not exaggerating. Because so many shipments are "hot" - meaning they better get out fast, or else - Roberts picks up most of them within 90 minutes of receiving a customer's order. About 96% of the time - not counting runs delayed by "acts of God" - Roberts delivers on time. More amazing still, it does the job almost entirely with trucks.

But Roberts is nothing like what you'd expect from a trucking company. It's a 50-year-old organization that's using cutting-edge technology to reinvent an old-line industry. Roberts was one of the first trucking outfits to monitor its fleet with satellite tracking and onboard computers. The system calculates whether shipments are on schedule and, when they fall behind a 15-minute grace period, alerts the appropriate dispatcher and the driver. Roberts is rolling out a system of IBM network computers with Java-based graphics to "push" delivery information to dispatchers. It has implemented amazingly powerful software, called Dynamic Vehicle Allocation, to determine which trucks Roberts should dispatch where, and to predict future business. "We are as much an information company as we are a transportation company," declares Bruce Simpson, the company's president.

But the company's success is really as much about customers as computers. What do Oprah Winfrey, James Cameron, and President Clinton have in common? They've all used Roberts Express. Oprah needed lighting equipment - pronto - when she decided to film her show in the Texas town where she was battling cattle ranchers in court. Cameron needed equipment on the set of Titanic in Nova Scotia. The White House needed its Christmas cards.

You name it, Roberts has moved it. Baseball bats belonging to Mo Vaughn. Paintings by Monet and van Gogh. And it continues to find ways to keep its business moving. In the last decade, it launched CharterAir, an expedited air service with companion ground support; White Glove Services, a division that handles sensitive cargo (such as radioactive materials) or cargo requiring the use of a specially equipped vehicle; and AutoQuik, a service that hauls automotive components.

"In some ways, we're a current-events company," says marketing manager Joan Mileski. "If you're reading about it in the paper, we're probably involved in it." Sometimes Roberts gets involved before the news breaks. In the days leading up to Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the company hauled low-level explosives for the U.S. military. "We had a feeling that something big might happen," says David Hodge, manager of White Glove Services. "I hate to sound so matter-of-fact, but in this business, we get used to unusual things happening."

The stories that Roberts employees relish most involve major logistical obstacles and tight deadlines. Greulich recalls the time a Roberts truck was stuck in traffic. Its CharterAir division dispatched a Huey helicopter to carry the load to its destination. Vasilatos tells about a load he needed to get to Ontario. He couldn't find a truck that could take on enough hours to make the run on its own. So he pieced together a team of vans and trucks to pick up the shipment at two different locations and transfer the loads in mid-run. They made it on time. "We could have gotten hit for a number of service failures on that job," Vasilatos says. "I take pride in the fact that we pulled it off."