4-page Case Study - Posted 10/1/2008
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Transportation Provider to Save Hundreds of Thousands Annually with Mapping Solution
Arkansas-based J.B. Hunt Transport Services sends trucks and drivers across Canada and the United States. To locate repair vendors for drivers, road service operators used atlases, the Internet, and an unstructured database of repair facility information, then calculated the distance to likely area facilities with the desktop version of an industry standard application for mileage and mapping. The process was slow and created long wait times. To auto-generate vendor lists sorted by quality and proximity, the company integrated Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology with data from the trucks’ computers and current vendor lists ranked by internal experts. The company cut driver wait times by more than 6,000 hours, decreased repair rework, and expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually by getting use of its data and employees’ knowledge.
Situation
J.B. Hunt Transport Services, one of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America, provides transportation services to a diverse group of customers throughout the continental United States and Canada. Incorporated in 1961, it offers transportation of full truckload freight using company-controlled equipment and both company drivers and independent contractors.
Demand for freight trips in the United States has increased steadily since the 1970s, driven by population and economic growth, global trade, and changing supply chain practices. However, demand is outstripping the capacity of the nation’s highway, rail, waterway, and port systems to handle the trips. The result is congestion, increased freight transportation prices, and less-reliable trip times. The effect on individual shipments and transactions is usually modest, but these factors add up to a higher cost of doing business for transportation firms. Tim Ehlert, Maintenance Engineering Consultant for J.B. Hunt, explains, “We spend a lot on fuel, driver pay, truck maintenance, and depreciation in order to make a few cents. Any advantage we can get in improving efficiency and reducing costs positively affects our bottom line.”
Isolated Information, Underutilized Systems
The company’s Fleet Support Department handles both scheduled maintenance and unscheduled or emergency repairs for trucks (tractors) and trailers. Road service operators direct drivers who need unscheduled repairs to the best and nearest available repair facilities, which are either company-owned or—more commonly—third-party vendors. Drivers would call the road service call center to report their equipment problems and their locations, and operators used atlases and whichever free online resources that they were comfortable with, such as Google, MapQuest, and some smaller providers, to find local repair facilities. Operators used a repair-facility database, but its interface provided limited access to information on the reliability and quality of the various facilities, and the types of services that they were capable of providing. If the information was outdated, operators wasted time calling repair shops that were out of business.
The company made the vendor selection process telephone-based, though the company’s trucks have on-board computers (OBCs) and global positioning system (GPS) antennas, because having drivers type into a keypad while on the road would be time-consuming and potentially dangerous. Drivers waited while operators consulted an atlas or online map to search for cities within a 50-mile radius, looked through lists of repair facilities in the area in print or online telephone listings, consulted the database, and then switched to an industry standard desktop routing application to enter the city codes to calculate the mileage to each city to determine the closest ones. Often this involved typing in dozens of city codes. Operators put the drivers on hold and called each prospective repair facility to check appointment availability. Because they had limited access to expert knowledge of the repair vendors—for example, which ones were timely, reliable, and did the best work—repairs made by some vendors had to be redone. Rework incidents were not captured in order to prevent those vendors from being used again, which wasted time and money. Once they located a facility, operators used routes generated by Maptuit FleetNav to get street-level driving directions for drivers. FleetNav is a niche solution that provides routing and directions for commercial equipment such as tractor trailers, which legally can use only Class 8 routes.
Difficult-to-Use Technology
By looking at its phone-system statistics, the company knew that drivers often hung up several times before reaching an operator, due to long wait times. In addition, operators did not have enough knowledge of the thousands of repair facilities in all three countries to choose the most reliable and cost-effective ones each time. Much of this knowledge was with various maintenance outsource coordinators in the company, but was not accessible to the operators, who required extensive training in order to start helping drivers. New operators took six weeks of training and then went through a 90-day probation period of taking calls under constant supervision. Ehlert notes, “It was a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process. A 50-mile radius can have hundreds of cities in it—what are the chances of finding the right vendor every time? You would have to check every one of them and do a cost analysis, which our operators don’t have time to do.”
The company wanted a well-supported solution that it could use to integrate maps and repair-facility rankings with its existing data sources and systems, one that would boost efficiency and lower costs, with quicker and easier service responses to drivers.
Solution
Developers at J.B. Hunt worked on and off from mid to late 2006 to determine solution requirements and do conceptual and functional design. When the company was ready to choose the technologies, it formed a Request for Information (RFI) committee of management members and representatives from every internal department and division that would potentially use the new solution. The RFI committee considered Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology along with solutions from the other leading providers of geographic information system modeling and mapping software, including two free Web-based solutions.
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Our drivers spend less time waiting—when our operators pick up the phone, they can say, ‘Hey, Raymond, I see that you’re scheduled to go to Texas, but you’re sitting in Arkansas—what is going on?’ |
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Shane Garner Developer, J.B. Hunt Transport Services |
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Though satellite imagery from one of the free Web-based solutions impressed the RFI committee and was familiar to many users, the unique bird’s eye view in Virtual Earth was even more appealing. Bird’s eye imagery depicts cities and points of interest at a 45-degree-angle view for a realistic visual tour of major cities and landmarks. Mark Brewer, IT Services Manager at J.B. Hunt, says, “When people realized that they could get views from an airplane—not from a satellite—of company and customer assets, that helped us choose Virtual Earth.”
The committee also liked the service and support from Microsoft compared with other options, such as free Web applications. It decided that the combination of the MSDN® developer program and a Microsoft technical support contract offered the most security for a long-term, reliable experience. Drew Schimelpfenig, Information Systems Consultant for J.B. Hunt, says, “When it came to support, with some of the other solutions, it wasn’t extremely clear as to what their service level agreements would be. With Microsoft, we knew that getting support would not be a problem.” The online, interactive Virtual Earth software development kit (SDK) was also a plus, because developers could work with the actual code while considering the product.
In two days, a developer created a workable proof of concept (POC) of a new solution based on Virtual Earth. Though it was not yet integrated with company databases, it displayed maps using layers and features of Virtual Earth, such as the maps and photo imagery, along with company asset locations displayed on the same interface. Brewer found the POC very valuable for convincing the committee to select Virtual Earth—both as a dynamic introduction to the graphical user interface (GUI) and features and because of its short development time.
The development team found Virtual Earth well-supported and easy to work with. “You can customize the map to show what you want and zoom to whatever level you want,” says Brewer. “You control what data feeds into your application and how users interact with it. With MSDN, if a developer had a question that I couldn’t answer, they could quickly go find the answer for themselves.”
Development on the new vendor-selector solution began in late 2006; various functionalities were implemented from October 2006 through April 2007.
Using Virtual Earth, the company can integrate a common operating environment with internal databases and Web or desktop applications, for easy access to current data. The IT team based the vendor-selector solution on an internal Web page, for which it built a GUI based on Virtual Earth using the Swing Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) for Java.
The application draws on vendor, driver, and equipment data residing in an Oracle database and the OBCs—now that the company was able to use Virtual Earth to integrate these elements, it structured and updated its database of repair-facility information and added quality rankings from maintenance outsource coordinators to each entry. To help operators quickly identify assets on map or photo views or in list form and quickly grasp relationships among them, the J.B. Hunt IT staff designed custom, color-coded icons to represent various assets, such as tractors and trailers, company and customer sites, and company and vendor repair facilities. Company facilities are ranked highest and represented by an animated icon of a mechanic who wears the J.B. Hunt brown uniform, complete with company logo, and waves a wrench. Vendor facilities that are highly rated may be ranked and displayed above ones that are closer to drivers’ locations. Virtual Earth uses an algorithm in the XML that it employs to show facility and other asset icons in whatever geographical radius the operators select on a map with a mouse, and displays repair facilities color-coded by quality ranking: best, good, fair, and so on. Operators can also apply various filters in Virtual Earth to narrow the list by several criteria, such as by dealer type if equipment is still under warranty.
When operators select a facility, Virtual Earth populates a dispatch screen with the unit’s geocode number (supplied by the OBC) and provides a list of types of mechanical issues, such as a tire or engine problem, that the facility handles. When operators double-click a selected facility’s phone number, the solution connects to the company’s call center application, which autodials the number for them so that they can make an appointment.
J.B. Hunt also built a job locator based on Virtual Earth that is available on the J.B. Hunt Web site. Job seekers and company driver managers, salespeople, and marketing personnel use it to get visual images of company sites combined with text descriptions of job locations and company facilities.
Benefits
J.B. Hunt uses Virtual Earth to consolidate data from various systems into a single interface that operators can use to quickly see downed equipment in relation to the facilities where it can be repaired, and use data collected from internal experts to select the best facilities. Thanks to the new vendor-selector solution, J.B. Hunt has improved service wait times for drivers, reduced training times for new road-service operators, and provides better vendor repair work for company vehicles. The company expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and more than 6,000 person-hours annually with these new efficiencies, and plans to integrate more data with Virtual Earth in the future.
Increased Efficiency and Lower Costs
J.B. Hunt expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by getting maximum use out of its employees’ knowledge of reliable and cost-effective vendor repair facilities. Choosing the best and closest facilities for each job minimizes rework and maximizes value, through such benefits as better use of equipment warranty coverage. “We are keeping our equipment running better and on the road more. Now, if Fleet Support Department operators make a bad decision, it is because our experts didn’t have their vendors ranked correctly—not because they don’t have quick access to relevant information,” says Ehlert.
Training times for new operators have gone from 18 weeks to two weeks in many cases, for $6,000 to $7,000 in productivity gains per new agent. “With the old manual system, operators had to have some knowledge of where vendors were and which ones were good,” Ehlert says. “Spread out over Canada and the United States, that’s a lot to expect from them. Now we have built-in expert knowledge in the application, so a reasonably logical person can take a road service call, and, if they know a little bit about trucks, pick a good vendor.”
Schimelpfenig says, “The real value that Virtual Earth brought us was showing the truck location and those of the repair facilities in relation to it, all on the same map. Even the best and most experienced fleet support agents can’t calculate that in their heads.”
The number of abandoned service calls has gone down, because drivers are getting faster service from operators. The company saves more than 6,000 person-hours annually in wait times and from using current vendor information. This makes everyone happier. Shane Garner, Developer for J.B. Hunt, notes, “We used to get driver complaints, but not anymore. Our drivers spend less time waiting. When our operators pick up the phone, they can say, ‘Hey, Raymond, I see that you’re scheduled to go to Texas, but you’re sitting in Arkansas—what is going on?'"
Operators can even use the bird’s eye view to zoom in on satellite images of drivers’ locations to get a better sense of the situation. Schimelpfenig says, “If we need to send vendors to a downed truck to fix it, the operator can tell them, ‘It’s near that green building just around the corner from you.’ Or, ‘You can’t go down that alley; you have to take another route to get there.’”
Good Support and Ease of Development
IT staff at J.B. Hunt appreciate the ease of use of Virtual Earth, including the comprehensive documentation and the interactive SDK. Schimelpfenig says, “The support we had before we paid even one dime was exceptional, and today I have personal contacts in Microsoft product groups who will answer my questions about current and future technologies. The fact that Virtual Earth is supported and under contract is important, because someday we will put this technology in front of our customers, and it will have our brand on it. We know it will be reliable and consistent.”
Brewer adds, “As a developer, I also really appreciate the look and feel of the GUI in Virtual Earth—it is better than the competition’s.”
With Virtual Earth, developers at J.B. Hunt can easily integrate information from databases and XML files to create custom features for new applications. Brewer sums up: “By implementing applications based on Virtual Earth, we went from drivers sitting on hold while operators paged through atlases to really getting value out of our people’s time and knowledge, and from existing resources like OBCs and equipment warranties.”
Microsoft Virtual Earth
The Microsoft Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services providing quality geospatial data, rich imagery, cutting edge technology, and dependable performance that helps organizations visualize data and provide immersive end-user experiences. With ongoing investments in innovation driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform continues to offer new map detail and imagery, feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities.
For more information, visit:
www.microsoft.com/virtualearth
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about J.B. Hunt products and services, call (608) 274-5789 or visit the Web site at:
www.jbhunt.com
