TMW Moves to Smooth Out Operations in Response to Customers’ Feedback

This story appears in the Sept. 29 print edition of Transport Topics.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Officials of trucking-management software vendor TMW Systems Inc. last week outlined steps the company is taking to smooth internal operations and user experiences, and several of its associated plug-in partners announced new integrations with TMW products.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 1,900 at the company’s user conference here, TMW’s CEO, David Wangler, said the company is upgrading its support teams and that TMW has reached a milestone in its growth that requires restructuring.

Wangler said TMW has created product-management groups and is exploring establishment of software-development groups.

“We humbly ask for your support and patience as we go through these changes,” Wangler told the Sept. 22 opening session of the conference. A company representative later explained that TMW has experienced rapid growth and expansion that have caused some customer-support issues.

Conference attendees also heard from speakers who discussed growth of the economy, its effect on trucking capacity and the driver shortage — as well as problems presented by government regulation.

The conference also included a wide range of educational sessions dealing with specifics of TMW’s portfolio of products.

Rod Strata, executive vice president for operations, told the audience of the system’s users that “we have heard you loud and clear,” and outlined steps he is taking to integrate TMW’s solutions into what he called “TMW 3.0.”

For example, Strata said he is working on improving customer support, saying TMW “is going to be a much more transparent organization . . . we’re going to live up to customer commitments.”

Among the changes Strata outlined was making TMW “much more prescriptive,” stressing that it is sometimes better to find and advocate new ways of doing things than to replicate the way customers have approached problems in the past.

And those customers have plenty of challenges on their plates, said speaker John Larkin, transportation analyst with Stifel Nicolaus. Not the least of which is finding drivers. And he said several factors are contributing to that shortage, from economic changes to government regulations that contribute to making trucking a less appealing occupation than it once was.

Larkin said the people who used to become truck drivers were interested in the personal freedom the jobs offered, but maintains that today’s drivers have less of that freedom.

“Drivers today feel they are micromanaged,” he said, by tightly controlled work hours, fuel-optimization programs that dictate stops, highway congestion that cuts driven miles, electronic logging, video monitoring, and more.

“No wonder we have a driver shortage,” he said, adding that trucking will struggle to find drivers until “automation solves this.”

And those drivers are facing a lot of gridlock, said Robert Voltmann, president of the Transportation Intermediaries Association. To help ease road congestion, Voltmann said Congress needs to raise fuel taxes in upcoming legislation, then deal with the longer-term problem of finding a new way to fund highway infrastructure.

He told an education session that manufacturers have said that the United States needs to spend $100 billion a year to get highways in shape to adequately move the economy’s freight.

Among TMW’s vendor partners announcing enhanced integration or product improvements were Rand McNally, TMW sister companies PeopleNet and ALK Technologies, Omnitracs and iGlobal.

Commercial-vehicle mapping vendor Rand McNally said data from its mobile fleet-management devices can now be integrated with TMS products. It said the integration enables fleets to manage maintenance through TMW’s fleet-maintenance software, according to the announcement.

The integration provides real-time vehicle fault codes and location of the vehicle, enabling fleets to have a rapid response to maintenance issues and manage repairs to minimize vehicle downtime.

ALK announced that its truck-navigation software is now integrated with TMW’s fuel-optimization product and that ALK’s latest update of routing software is integrated with TMW products.

The companies said that TMW’s IDSC ExpertFuel is integrated with ALK’s CoPilot Truck in-cab navigation system through TMWSuite and Total Mail systems.

The integration allows carriers to reduce fuel ex-penses and out-of-route mileage by automating route planning and ensuring route compliance.

Cab-communications provider PeopleNet, which like TMW and ALK is owned by Trimble, announced new integration features with TMW’s TotalMail product. The new features give PeopleNet and TMWSuite users improved access to information related to work-flow stops and cycle times, which PeopleNet said improves fleet efficiency and utilization.

Omnitracs, the cab-communications vendor formerly owned by Qualcomm, announced new TMW integration capabilities to help streamline fleet operations.

The company said the changes enable fleets using TMW’s TL2000 and Omnitracs’ thin client AS/400 integration for mobile computing platforms to gain increased visibility into Omnitracs Portal features, as well as en-hanced integration for Driver Workflow and ALK RouteSync navigation, supporting improved fleet management, customer service and profitability.

Cab-communications vendor iGlobal announced the launch of an in-cab imaging package with no per-scan fee that reads bar codes and populates reference numbers for instant transmittal from the truck cab to the web, along with simplified e-logs that require minimal driver training.