Dear Fellow Executive:
Nearly 700 attendees – 20% more than last year. Representatives from close to 200 trucking companies. More than 100 classes, roundtables, hands-on sessions and workshops. Exhibits from more than 30 technology vendors. 72 hours of “Seeing, Meeting and Learning TM” with colleagues.
At TMW, we’ve coined the phrase “Numbers Speak Louder than Words™” – and these numbers speak volumes about the success of our 18th Annual User Group Conference which was billed with that same theme. While it’s impossible to quantify the number of ideas for improving efficiencies that were generated among the attendees, suffice it to say that the figure far exceeds all of these numbers combined.
One more number of note from User Group: 45, which was the length in minutes of my opening address on the state of the industry and TMW. For those of you who attended the conference, I wanted to recap some of my thoughts. For those of you who couldn’t join us, here’s a brief summary of my remarks:
Even though the U.S. economy continues to prosper and many carriers are enjoying their best financial results in quite awhile, there are still several formidable challenges that are threatening your productivity and profitability. These include record fuel prices, a severe shortage of qualified drivers, uncertainty surrounding the new Hours of Service regulations and the upcoming 2007 EPA mandated engine-emissions standards for commercial vehicles – just to name a few.
On top of this, you’re also faced with the task of keeping up with emerging technologies such as the Internet2, RFID and ZigBee because they could have a significant impact on your performance and efficiencies down the road.
TMW has always been committed to helping you overcome these challenges and take advantage of the opportunities they present. Our team is dedicated to providing you with the tools you need to become more productive, efficient and profitable for the long term. This includes making your everyday processes smoother, easier and faster by paying close attention to our “blocking and tackling.” Our SUR initiative, which stands for Supportability, Usability and Reliability, allows us to focus on these daily productivity issues and make improvements to our system – which we’ve done more than 750 times during the past 18 months. These enhancements have already saved our customers millions of keystrokes, made hundreds of screens more intuitive and boosted productivity significantly.
We’re also committed to providing every customer with world-class service and ensuring that support is available whenever and wherever you need it. Not only have we improved our call flow, but we’ve also increased our frontline client support staff by 60% to enhance the quality and responsiveness of our support team. Customer service remains the number one priority of everyone at TMW.
Finally, TMW remains committed to innovation and making quantum improvements to your bottom line. That’s why we established a new group called Profitability and Client Efficiency or PACE in January. This eight-member team, with a combined 100 years experience in trucking and technology, is charged with creating next-generation intuitive products that improve workforce efficiencies and driver productivity and reduce operational costs – and make your business more competitive. PACE has already been responsible for inventing the following products and services:
• ResultsNow by TMW™, a web-based performance monitoring application that automatically runs a list of real-time management reports based on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). At a glance, you can compare your performance versus each of your operational and financial metrics and know instantly where you stand.
• The Dawg™, a business activity monitoring tool that allows you to define “alert thresholds” for each KPI in ResultsNow. Any time you have an exception that falls outside that threshold, The Dawg triggers an alert so that you can immediately take corrective action.
• Visual Planning Tool, an intuitive, driver-focused system that provides a calendar view of daily work schedules – by driver and by time. It includes all the information you need to manage multiple drivers with time-sensitive loads in a simple, easy-to-use, color-coded format.
• Intelligent Dispatch Assistant (IDA), an intuitive tool that steers Dispatchers to better and more profitable driver/load matches. IDA evaluates and ranks possible driver-to-load matches by their impact on profitability so that Dispatchers can choose the best option for each shipment.
• D2Link™, a cost-effective solution for connecting drivers to dispatchers. D2Link uses inexpensive cell phones with built-in GPS chips and basic data processing capabilities to enable carriers to integrate Dispatch-to-Driver communications into their network via TMW’s D2Link Java software.
• Carrier Alliance Network? (CAN), a load exchange service that enables our customers to collaborate via our web-based technology to easily share loads and power to improve asset utilization, increase driver satisfaction and enhance profitability. We already have more than 80 carriers participating in CAN today, and we invite those of you who haven’t joined yet to find out more about the advantages of this service.
Some of these products have already been implemented and have helped our customers save thousands of dollars, retain drivers and improve profitability. Stay tuned for more details on other exciting developments from TMW.
I concluded my speech with some personal remarks about the many opportunities that being an American citizen has afforded me. I invite you to view a complete copy of my User Group Opening Address as well as view some photo highlights from the conference by clicking on the link below.
If you had a chance to attend this year’s User Group, I hope you returned to the office with many ideas for maximizing the functionality of your TMW solution. If you were unable to join us, I strongly encourage you to consider attending next year's User Group and take advantage of this opportunity to learn how to increase efficiencies and network with your peers to share best practices and successes.
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you and your family a safe and happy holiday season and a prosperous 2005. I look forward to building upon the momentum we created in 2004 and to helping your organization reach new heights in 2005 and beyond.
Regards,
Tom Weisz
President & CEO
Click Here For Full User Group Speech and Highlights