Continued Growth of Multi-mode Transport Spurs Information Technology Systems

By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter

This story appears in the Jan. 19 print edition of Transport Topics.

The information systems that support intermodal trucking companies are much like the business of intermodalism itself: complex, multi-headed and increasingly important to motor carriers.

“We’re seeing a lot of activity in the intermodal market,” said Sean Jennings, technical sales manager for TMW Systems, a Beachwood, Ohio provider of trucking software.

Likewise, “the demands of intermodal carriers have increased significantly. They’re getting larger, more sophisticated,” Jennings said.

A trucking executive said the sophistication of these systems, and the fleets that use them, is largely a byproduct of necessity.

“Intermodal operations are substantially different, and a lot more difficult at the tactical level, than running a pure over-the-road trucking operation,” said Steve Van Kirk, vice president of intermodal commercial management for Schneider National, Green Bay, Wis.

Unlike software designed to assist with truckload work — or even the more challenging less-than-truckload realm — intermodal information systems must be capable of following shipments across multiple modes of transportation, technology experts told Transport Topics.

“We have to [track] every leg of a container move: who moved what when [and] on which chassis and trailer,” said Roy Cashman, chief technology officer for Roadlink USA, an Atlanta-based intermodal carrier with an owner-operator network of several thousand trucks.

When intermodal freight changes hands, which it does many times on any given shipment, any electronic data associated with that freight go along for the ride.

Equipment tracking also becomes much more challenging in the intermodal environment because containers typically are unpowered. That means that container tracking devices require a dedicated power supply — a battery that eventually will need to be replaced.

For these reasons, “you have to start from the ground up to make an intermodal [IT] system,” said Randall Burrell, senior vice president of TMW and general manager for the company’s TruckMate product.

That notion was a pearl of wisdom that Schneider National had to pry from the oyster for themselves after the company branched out into intermodal service about 15 years ago.

Today, the carrier operates under an asset-based model and maintains a fleet of about 10,000 containers, necessitating both advanced asset-tracking capabilities and specially tailored software systems for the back office.

The decision to invest in such a large captive fleet of containers was at least partially driven by the staggering task of tracking them all, Schneider’s Van Kirk said.

“For a period of time, we were running a lot of shared equipment in addition to our own equipment,” Van Kirk said. “That’s the worst possible spot you can be in,” because it amounts to tracking multiple container fleets.

But with only its own containers to  track, Schneider is now free to devote resources to doing that job more efficiently. Among the initiatives developed to support that objective is the deployment of solar-rechargeable batteries for container tracking units.

Because containers lack the seven-pin connector that links ordinary trailers to a tractor’s power supply, Schneider — and any other equipment owner interested in tracking a container — must depend upon a battery-operated system, Van Kirk said.

Schneider has “about 200 [solar] test devices on our containers,” said Paul Knoll, intermodal technology and process manager of Schneider Intermodal, adding that the company will decide next year whether to roll out the technology fleetwide.

Schneider’s solar-rechargeable battery systems are provided by Qualcomm Inc., San Diego. Norm Ellis, head of Qualcomm’s telematics business, estimated that the solar units can help battery-powered tracking systems “last a decade, or maybe longer.”

Meanwhile, for the back office, Schneider is currently in the middle of a $200 million IT overhaul, a project intended to replace a patchwork system of homegrown software with a customized, enterprisewide  system co-developed with Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif.

The new Oracle system will roll up capabilities currently spread across several in-house programs, including tracking and tracing, and event-based notifications for Schneider’s customers, said Knoll, who supervises the overhaul.

He added that the customized Oracle system will support all segments of Schneider’s business, including intermodal.

Of the traditional truckload companies that have branched out into intermodal transportation, Schneider is among the largest. The company ranks No. 9 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.

In spite of the complexities associated with intermodal transportation, it is increasing in popularity.

The preliminary results of the latest “commodity flow survey,” conducted jointly every five years by the Department of Transportation and the Census Bureau, showed that rail-truck combinations in 2007 moved 213,411 tons of domestic freight valued at about $197.4 billion.

That volume compares with 43 million tons valued at about $70 billion in 2002, the previous year in which the survey was conducted, according to the agencies.

In the same period, international container traffic also skyrocketed.

In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, U.S. ports handled about 29 million 20-foot-equivalent units of containerized freight, almost 10 million more TEUs than in 2002, according to a survey conducted by Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

As a parallel, an executive with GE Asset Intelligence, the fleet telematics arm of General Electric, observed that intermodal telematics have gotten a shot in the arm.

Traditional truckload carriers “are your largest intermodal shippers, [and that is] starting to drive the adoption of [more] telematics on the intermodal side,” said Doug Hoehn, commercial leader at GE Asset Intelligence in Dallas.

Like Schneider, at least one smaller intermodal carrier has found that the nature of its business necessitated a fine-tuning of its IT systems.

“Intermodal is a much more complex gamut than doing truckload or less-than-truckload,” said James Richardson, chief information officer of G&D Integrated.

G&D, Morton, Ill., maintains a fleet of about 450 trucks to support its manufacturing and logistics businesses. The company’s transport operations are almost entirely intermodal in scope.

In late 2007, G&D began fitting its trucks with onboard technology from PeopleNet, Chaska, Minn., including the Global Positioning System, Richardson said.

However, G&D found that it had to work closely with PeopleNet to modify the company’s out-of-the-box systems to function fluidly in an intermodal environment, said Richardson.

For example, PeopleNet’s PACOS service can generate automatic updates on a truck’s location, based on data gathered by onboard telematics systems.

However, G&D’s TMW Systems dispatch software, TruckMate, associates these updates with a single freight bill, Richardson said.

That process may be practical for truckload hauling, where each load generates only one freight bill, but a single intermodal shipment may require a driver to make many nonrevenue trips — to retrieve a container or chassis, for example — that generate no freight bills at all.

Because of this situation, G&D is working with both PeopleNet and TMW on what Richardson described as a “queue system.”

“The enhancement that is being worked on between G&D and the two vendors is to . . . modify the TruckMate system to send a load offer and a detailed list of stops to a driver,” Richardson said.

The system eventually will allow both dispatchers and drivers to see a step-by-step list of the trips generated by a single intermodal shipment, Richardson said.