Tiger Lines Gains Enterprise-wide Visibility

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Tiger Lines Gains Enterprise-wide Visibility with Solution from TMW Systems

Lodi Truck Service was founded in 1935 with just one truck in California's Lodi-Woodbridge Appalachian wine country, while two affiliated family members established Tiger Lines in 1981 with two trucks. Later, both companies merged and now generate approximately $30 million dollars in annual revenue. Currently operating throughout the western states, Tiger Lines is still headquartered in Lodi, California and has terminal locations in Long Beach, Oakland, Modesto and Woodland.

The Challenge

With four different divisions that are responsible for the diverse requirements of transporting light-weight freight, agricultural products, refuse, forestry by-products and intermodal containers, Tiger Lines has to contend with many complexities that other truckload carriers do not. One of these challenges was having timely visibility into what Tiger Lines Executive Vice President Jim Musgrave calls “the machinery of the business” and how each separate division was operating at any given point in time. “We were using an enterprise management software program, but it didn’t have the capability to dump information into spreadsheets without a lot of manipulation,” explained Musgrave. “The data became outdated because we usually didn’t see the reports until 15-20 days after each month’s closing.”

The Solution

Tiger Lines began implementing TMWSuite and ResultsNow by TMW^TM in early 2004 to gain better visibility across the entire organization and timelier access to the quantifiable information needed to make informed business decisions faster. The company has employed several different integrated components of TMWSuite, including:

Visual Dispatch, which allows Tiger Lines to control all dispatch activities from a central application that provides easy access to information for dispatching single or multiple moves. The planning worksheet enables Tiger’s dispatchers to match moves with available and qualified resources to reduce empty miles and increase asset utilization.
The Settlement capability enables Tiger Lines to easily calculate drivers’ pay by the ton, hour or mile – depending on the requirement.
Microsoft® Great Plains, which has allowed Tiger Lines to integrate its front office processes with back office operations. The Great Plains financial tools enhance the visibility and control of the entire business.

With ResultsNow, TMW’s web-based performance monitoring application, Tiger Lines established Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), goals and grades for each of its divisions. The company can now automatically generate reports on such metrics as Revenue per Driver, Revenue per Mile, Billing Lag Time and Days Sales Outstanding on a daily basis so that each division’s vice president has an accurate – and up-to-date – picture of their performance.

The Result

The combined efficiencies gained from using the TMWSuite components have resulted in substantial labor savings for Tiger Lines – and have allowed employees to concentrate on more customer-focused tasks. For example, before implementing TMWSuite, a Tiger employee had to manually compare one customer’s weekly bills of lading for approximately 2,000 shipments versus a settlement sheet line by line to ensure that there weren’t any errors. Now, the customer submits an Excel file listing all shipments that automatically populate the appropriate software fields, and Tiger can sort the data by weight or certificate number to easily identify any loads that don’t match. The process that once took 2-4 hours can now be completed in less than three minutes.

With ResultsNow, Tiger Lines has access to up-to-the-minute reports that are generated daily –enabling management and each division VP to make decisions much quicker and have tighter control over business processes.

“With the openness of TMW’s database, I know that if we can capture the information, we can measure it,” said Musgrave, adding that one of the company’s goals is to measure profit and loss by truck.

Future Plans

Tiger Lines is currently implementing TMW Imaging, which provides quick and reliable access to high-speed scanning and electronic document management. TMW Imaging improves customer service and cash flow by expediting the delivery of invoice support documentation. Tiger Lines expects TMW Imaging to have a sizeable impact on decreasing collection time, not to mention reducing the administrative burden of record creation, storage and retrieval. By adding the imaging component to its current solution, the company also expects to reduce its billing lag time by one day.

“TMWSuite has eliminated the ‘blackhole' of information and allowed us to have a better understanding of our business.”
Jim Musgrave, EVP Tiger Lines

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