Two Truckload Carriers Install Software to Help With Routing, Fuel Purchasing
This story appears in the Aug. 24 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Truckload carriers C.R. England and Knight Transportation each recently announced they were investing in new software aimed at making its routing and fuel purchasing more efficient.
C.R. England, Salt Lake City, said that it brought online load planning software from Manhattan Associates’ Carrier suite. Knight, Phoenix, said it licensed fuel pricing and routing software from TMW Systems.
C.R. England’s installation in-cludes six Manhattan modules. Not all of those are running live, but the carrier already is using two in day-to-day operations, an executive said.
“We are currently fully implemented on Driver & Load [and] on Drop & Swap,” said Ron Hall, C.R. England’s director of business strategy.
Driver & Load helps reduce the chance of a truck deadheading hundreds of miles for freight because one load planner did not realize that there was available freight closer to the truck in another load planner’s zone.
“Planners are typically geographically aligned,” Hall said. “You don’t typically see one planner looking at another guy’s workload. Driver & Load allows us to evaluate moves between [geographic] markets that make sense.”
Installing Manhattan Associates software is the latest step in what is now a three-year-old effort at C.R. England to reduce the company’s operational footprint while improving truck utilization, Hall told Transport Topics.
The carrier signed a contract with Manhattan last June and has been working on the installations ever since.
C.R. England has been active with technology rollouts this year. In May, the company installed remote trailer monitoring systems from SkyBitz.
Hall said that the deflated economy has allowed the company to redirect some personnel to help get new IT systems in place.
“You’ve got some opportunities with manpower when business slows,” Hall said. “You have an opportunity to redirect some of those resources.”
Meanwhile, Knight installed IDSC Expert Fuel, an application provided by TMW Systems of Beachwood, Ohio.
“We felt that choosing IDSC Expert Fuel was a meaningful way to lower our fuel costs,” said David Jackson, Knight’s chief financial officer.
The carrier has been running the IDSC Expert Fuel for several months but only recently disclosed the purchase, according to a joint press release that Knight and TMW issued Aug. 11.
The software that C.R. England and Knight installed fits into a category known in information technology circles as “decision support systems.”
Such systems are designed to organize operational data that are too numerous to correlate by hand, then to present the data to personnel who need it to accomplish some task.
