Fresh Start 2002: On the Road Again

Exact Express is Yellow's most expensive and most profitable service. It's also growing at the fastest clip, with double-digit increases every year. Because of the service's guaranteed on-time delivery and its speed, Yellow is moving the sort of "hot" freight that it didn't get before: an overnight shipment of 40,000 flashlights from Los Angeles to Washington, DC for an outdoor event that took place during the 2001 presidential inauguration; marketing material that related to an acquisition, which had to reach 349 banks on the same Monday morning; 10,000 pounds of air freshener that was rushed to ground zero of the World Trade Center attack. Although customers call on Exact Express in emergencies, says Bonebrake, the goal is for them to make it a routine part of their just-in-time supply chain. Yellow no longer measures itself against the competition alone, says Zollars. It strives to be as fastidious about service as Nordstrom, Starbucks, and FedEx.

Exact Express is helping Yellow win back customers such as Timothy Slofkin, the traffic and purchasing manager for Interprint, a printing company in Clearwater, Florida. About six years ago, he stopped using Yellow because its shipping schedule was simply too inflexible, too limited. "Yellow was never willing to work with me," he says. A few years later, one of Yellow's sales reps told Slofkin about the company's online-ordering-and-tracking capability. Slofkin was skeptical, and since he didn't have a computer, he didn't have much use for the Web. But Yellow persisted, persuading Interprint to equip its shipping department with a computer and then training Slofkin on how to use MyYellow.com. Now he's one of 51,000 users registered on the site, and he's hooked. He routinely places orders online, tracks his shipments while they're en route, and reviews past shipments.

And Don't Forget About the Power of Technology

One of the main reasons that Yellow has been able to expand and improve service is its state-of-the-art technology. Since 1994, the company has spent about $80 million a year on its highly integrated information systems. The investment has led to significant changes in virtually every stage of the business. It has affected how orders get processed and relayed from the call centers to the terminals, how the dispatchers assign drivers for pickups and deliveries, and how the dock workers load and unload trailers.

Yellow's early years were rather low-tech by comparison. In the 1920s, the Harrell brothers, A.J. and Cleve, who once hauled freight by horse- and mule-drawn wagons, operated a small but growing fleet of yellow Model T taxicabs (according to company lore, the original yellow cab) and buses in Oklahoma City. In 1924, the Harrells incorporated the Yellow Cab Transit Co. Two years later, they acquired a couple of trucks to handle the freight that they had been hauling on their buses, mainly oil-rig parts bound for Tulsa. Back then, there was no way to track shipments or to guarantee that freight would arrive at a certain time. It got there when it got there. How long it took often depended on the condition of the two-lane highway that day.

Nowadays, even though Yellow essentially does the same thing that it did then, the operation is considerably more involved. What was a small regional company for many years has become a global enterprise with more than 14 million shipments a year, 377 terminals across the country, and partners around the world. And yet the technical demands are often overlooked. When Lynn Caddell left America West Airlines to become president of Yellow Technologies, a Yellow Corp. subsidiary with 350 employees, a colleague remarked on how boring trucking seemed compared with the airline industry. Caddell didn't see it that way. "We're moving a product from one place to another, but there's a lot more complexity to it," she says. "Each of my 'passengers' is a different size and weight and needs a different amount of space. And they don't simply go from airport to airport. They go to hundreds of zip codes and addresses. Many of them need to arrive at their final destination at a specific time. Coordinating all of that is a huge challenge."

When customers call 1-800-MY-YELLOW, the system automatically opens a customer profile that corresponds to the caller's number. The representative instantly knows where the customer's company is located; what type of loading dock it has; the size, weight, and contents of previous shipments; previous shipping destinations; and who has signed for deliveries. If a customer calls back at a later point with the identical shipping order, say, several thousand pounds of freight from Memphis to Seattle, the process takes about 15 seconds. In other words, less time than it takes to order a pizza.