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.

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 alert functionality
within ResultsNow, “The Dawg™”. This watch dog constantly
scans transactional data and looks for exceptions to predefined
“alert thresholds” for each KPI. Any time that Kriska has
an exception that falls outside one of the thresholds, The Dawg
triggers a real-time alert so that the staff can immediately take
corrective action.

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 occur - instead of waiting until 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 now be more proactive
in communicating delays to customers - which has helped to
increase satisfaction.

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

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