Roberts Rules the Road

Information Is Power

How did something so simple - moving freight from point A to point B - get so complicated? Blame it on the emergence of speed and precision as critical success factors in the new world of business. Roberts used to be a prosaic, low-tech enterprise like every other trucking company. Before the arrival of computers and satellites and digital-mapping software, agents wrote orders on run-cards and calculated mileage with a ruler and a map. "I used to keep a cheat sheet on my desk with the mileage," says Vera Dizdar, the company's very first agent, who now works in accounting. In the old days, agents and dispatchers worked separately. The former took orders from customers without knowing which trucks were available; the latter retrieved the run-cards off a bulletin board, then scrambled to cover the deliveries.

The telephone was the only technology to speak of. Drivers were required to call in every four hours to update their positions. It was the only way the agents knew if their shipments were on schedule. If a truck broke down, they might not hear about it for hours. And there were other inefficiencies. Roberts calculated that by the time a driver had found a phone and a parking place for his rig and reached an agent, he'd already wasted 15 minutes. Counting check-ins and constant dispatch inquiries, each driver was making 11 telephone calls per shipment. With thousands of these drivers' calls coming into the company each day, drivers often wound up on hold, wasting more time, and customers had a hard time getting through.

In 1988, Roberts learned about OmniTRACS - QUALCOMM Inc.'s two-way satellite communications system. Roberts modified the system to create Customer Link, or C-Link, and installed satellite dishes and computers in its entire fleet, about 800 trucks at the time. The first year, the number of driver calls plummeted by half, the productivity of its dispatchers nearly doubled, and the fleet's loaded miles (that is, miles traveled by trucks carrying loads) jumped 5%.

Today Roberts knows where its trucks and its shipments are at all times, thanks to about 23,000 daily C-Link transactions. Three-quarters of these transactions are automated tracking "pings" - every hour, the computer determines the latitude and longitude of every truck whose onboard computer is turned on. In less than 30 seconds, the signal travels over phone lines from Akron to QUALCOMM's Network Management Center in San Diego, then 22,500 miles into outer space, where a satellite redirects the signal back down to the trucks, wherever they may be. Thirty seconds later, the signal retraces its path to Akron with "lat-long" positions accurate to within about 1,200 yards.

CharterAir's McClellan has a favorite saying: "We didn't invent the truck, the plane, the phone, the computer, or the satellite. But we did put them together." Roberts pioneered the use of satellite communications in trucking. It was also one of the first companies to integrate satellites and computers. From Akron, dispatchers instantly send a "run offer" to a driver with the total mileage of a job and what it pays. If the driver accepts the run, he downloads directions and any special instructions regarding the shipment directly into the terminal in his cab. The entire transaction doesn't require a single phone call.

Of course, collecting all this information raises another big challenge: how to inform, rather than overwhelm, the dispatchers who have to process it all. Under the company's old computer system, dispatchers used at least 48 different keystroke combinations to switch screens. Retrieving weather reports or help files was unwieldy, especially while juggling in-coming orders and tracking runs in progress. "They had to pull the information to them," says Del Rae Grose, Roberts's performance technologist. "What we're trying to do now is push the information at them."

Enter the network computer (NC). Roberts has worked closely with IBM to prototype a new NC device for its dispatchers. The NC divides the screen into five frames. The largest frame is the order screen, which works in conjunction with newer elements, like a shipment monitor. This Java-based graphic fits in the upper-right-hand corner and displays the status of up to 11 dispatched trucks. Since agents get hundreds of "alerts" each day, from drivers picking up or trucks running late, the graphic encourages triage: Green trucks are running on time, yellow trucks are cutting it close, red trucks are late. Agents focus their attention where it's needed most, on service failures.