Kriska Sees Results With TMW

Your Business

Kriska Competes With The Best

Founded in 1978, Kriska Transportation is a privately-held Canadian truckload carrier that primarily serves North American customers in the food and consumer products business. Consistently recognized as one of Canada’s best-managed companies, Kriska operates a fleet of approximately 350 tractors and 850 trailers - small enough to ensure flexibility and quick response and large enough to provide direct service coverage throughout North America on a daily basis.

The Challenge

In a market where Kriska competes against larger U.S. carriers that operate thousands of trucks, it’s imperative for the company to continuously identify ways to optimize asset utilization, improve customer service and boost profitability in order to enhance its competitive position.

That’s why Kriska wanted more visibility to its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) throughout the organization - so that everyone would constantly know how the company was performing and be more keenly aware of improvement opportunities.

The Solution

In early 2004, Kriska implemented ResultsNow by TMW™, a web-based performance monitoring application that automatically runs a pre-scheduled list of real-time management reports for each of the company’s KPIs - including Revenue per Mile, Empty Miles and Idle Trucks. ResultsNow enables Kriska to gauge its performance versus any metric at any given moment.

“We identify weaknesses and address them, and it makes us more competitive,” explained Paul Dean, General Manager for Kriska.
Kriska also deployed TMW Systems’ real-time exception monitoring app within ResultsNow, “The Dawg™”. This activity monitor constantly scans transactional data and looks for exceptions to predefined “alert thresholds” for any KPI or established business parameter. If Kriska has an exception that falls outside one of the thresholds, The Dawg triggers a real-time alert via email or desktop so that the staff can immediately take corrective action.

The Result

The combination of ResultsNow and The Dawg has had a dramatic impact on Kriska’s overall performance.
The real-time data provided by ResultsNow has helped Kriska to increase its collective focus on every facet of the business, from Payroll and Invoicing to Order Entry and Dispatch, because performance is continually measured - and the results are shared among all employees who are driving daily decisions. Driver satisfaction has also been enhanced because dispatchers can now look at every driver’s hours and down time and ensure that loads are divided fairly.

The Dawg has enabled Kriska to take corrective action on costly exceptions as soon as they register - instead of waiting until long after the fact. For example, if a dispatcher keys in the wrong postal code for an order, the driver could be misrouted 900 miles due to the human error. While that one mistake among 6,000 orders would be nearly impossible to spot manually, The Dawg automatically flags the error before the driver is dispatched - saving the carrier both time and money. Kriska can also be more proactive in communicating delays to customers - which has helped to increase client satisfaction.

Since deploying The Dawg, Kriska has been able to decrease the threshold “alert level” for several metrics because employees are now more conscious of exceptions and have taken measures to correct their processes.

Future Plans

Now that Kriska is armed with real-time data for each of its KPIs, the company plans to drill down even further into the details on profitability for each customer by factoring in all variable and fixed costs.

“I am convinced that (ResultsNow) has driven our Revenue per Mile up by 3.4% by just having the technology available to reduce empty miles and look at capacity. We can make decisions to shift capacity from one terminal to the other if there are increased needs, and we can react faster. For every mile you lost yesterday, you can’t necessarily make it up today. You have to have that information at your fingertips instantly to make critical decisions that impact profitability.”

Paul Dean, General Manager, Kriska

Kriska Transportation Watches KPIs

Kriska Sees Results With TMW