ResultsNow by TMW™ Helps Carriers Achieve Their Profitability and Customer Service Goals

In these days of fluctuating freight volumes, rising fuel prices and changing regulations, most trucking company owners share a common goal: identifying and implementing processes to improve their operations’ efficiency and profitability. Critical to success in these initiatives is knowing exactly how the company is performing at any time in certain key areas. A patent-pending new product from TMW Systems Inc. offers trucking company owners and employees constant access to real-time information on their business performance. Called ResultsNow by TMW™, it provides the customized details they need to make informed decisions every day.

Cowan Systems, a short-haul, regional truckload carrier covering East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states, was one of the first to use ResultsNow. “Information is power in this business. If you don’t have accurate information and you can’t measure where you are having a problem, you can’t succeed,” explains Joe Cowan, president of Cowan Systems. “It doesn’t make any sense to wait for the end of the month when you get your profit and loss statement and say, ‘What happened?’ We need to know what is happening on a real-time basis. ResultsNow is a very easy measuring tool for someone to understand if we are having problems.”

ResultsNow is a unique combination of professional consulting services and sophisticated software that provides continuous visibility to the individual parameters a company uses to monitor its day-to-day health. These parameters may include financial, customer service and/or operational goals. Some companies, like Cowan, measure their success by revenue per truck per day. For others, the number of deadhead miles or on-time percentage may be more important. During the initial consulting phase of ResultsNow implementation, a TMW technical consultant works with the business owner and senior management to identify the individual company’s most important “key performance indicators” (KPIs) and how to calculate them.

Once the KPIs are selected, the TMW consultant sets up the software portion of ResultsNow to work with the client’s enterprise management system (like TMWSuite™) to automatically retrieve the data needed and run the proper calculations to give the real-time status of the goals being measured at preset intervals. The results are then displayed on the owner’s computer screen as well as on screens throughout the company. At Schneider National Bulk Carriers in Green Bay, Wisc., for example, the ResultsNow data is constantly projected on a large flat-screen monitor in the operations area, so everyone is aware of how the company is performing at all times.

The ResultsNow screen can be configured to show the KPIs for the day, week, month, year or other custom measurement. This allows companies to detect any trends and respond to them instantly. For example, Cowan tracks revenue per truck per day at each of its 14 terminals. When ResultsNow revealed that one of the terminals was trending down in this KPI, management quickly got involved. “After about a week of reviewing the lanes we were running and where we were having issues, we were able to turn around and increase that particular fleet by $50 per truck per day, for a fleet of about 30 trucks,” says Dennis Morgan, CFO. “It adds up to a lot of money. The ability to fix a situation like that quickly is key.”

In addition to providing nonstop visibility to the carrier’s key performance indicators on-screen, ResultsNow will also issue notifications via e-mail to select personnel whenever a preset threshold is violated — for example, if daily revenue falls below a certain standard. This enables employees to quickly drill down into the detailed information provided by ResultsNow to determine the cause of the problem and work to fix it proactively, rather than waiting until it may be too late.

“Part of the software component of ResultsNow is what’s known as a ‘dashboard,’” explains Tom Weisz, TMW president. “Just as a car dashboard tells the driver at a glance exactly what he or she needs to know to drive safely — how much gas is in the car, the speed, whether there’s a mechanical problem — the ResultsNow dashboard sums up at glance the information a business owner needs to know in order to drive his business productively. And by displaying that information constantly in front of everyone else in the organization, ResultsNow does even more. It clearly defines the company’s focus and ensures that everyone on the team is working in the same direction to meet the same overall goals.”

TMW spent more than 18 months developing ResultsNow. The current product represents the company’s more than 20 years experience in the trucking technology industry combined with extensive research and interviews with carriers about their needs. Other features of the product include:

• A report section that generates reports in four key areas over any set time frame (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.): empty miles, out-of-route miles, loads for major customers and load balance. TMW programmers can also write custom reports for customers as needed and can seamlessly incorporate a company’s existing reports into ResultsNow.
• The “report card” makes it as easy as possible to interpret the KPI data by assigning a letter grade, from “A” to “F,” to each area measured. • Visual graphs also help put the data in context.
• Because ResultsNow is a Web-based application, it can be programmed to include other Web sites in the rotation of screens that are shown. Some popular sites to include would be those showing weather conditions or fuel prices.
• Real-time monitoring of equipment location and status with graphics.
• Real-time load balance monitoring.

For more information about ResultsNow by TMW or any of the other transportation management system software and services available from TMW Systems, call (800) 401-6682 or visit the Web site at www.tmwsystems.com.

Founded in 1983, TMW Systems, Inc. is the leading developer and integrator of enterprise management software for the transportation industry. Its fleet management software products, TMWSuite™ and TL2000™, support more than 450 trucking companies. TMW’s products help transportation and logistics businesses easily collect, analyze and manage information for maximizing dispatch efficiency and delivering improved productivity and superior customer service.

Press Release Date: Feb. 9, 2004

Press Release Date

Mar 1, 2004