“It was a difficult winter,” says Tom Benusa, chief information officer of Transport America, which provides traditional over-the-road, dedicated and local transportation with a fleet of 1,450 trucks and logistics services. “There were lots of storms and shutdowns.”
The company’s corporate office in Eagan, Minn., was directly in the path of many storms, as were its most dense traffic lanes in the Midwest and East. Each severe weather incident ignited a chain of events to try and minimize the impact on Transport America and its customers.
An employee in the operations department was in charge of monitoring the weather and sending macro messages to drivers in the entire fleet, but this manual alerting system was not location-specific to trucks and loads; everyone received the same messages.
Driver managers, which Transport America calls fleet leaders, also would eyeball weather maps at their desks and use the company’s custom management software to identify the trucks and drivers moving in affected areas.
A distinct problem emerged from this approach, Benusa says. Drivers were not using their best judgment as for when and where to shut down and wait out the storm. Accidents were happening, and the fact that the company lacked a systematic way to manage weather events and give drivers specific instructions was partly to blame.
“It was all very manual, time-consuming and not thorough,” he says. “We began to realize that with all the technology we have, we should be able to do a better job of keeping our drivers and cargo safe.”
