CCJ

February 2017

Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal

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commercial carrier journal | february 2017 39 INNOVATORS U.S. XPRESS Chattanooga, Tenn. brainpower, they initiated a project to consolidate and centralize the reporting of real-time metrics to determine the true lifecycle cost of the eet's assets. By late 2015, the team had laid the groundwork for a new business intelli- gence system with next-level capabilities. e project's scope was more complex than accounting for the acquisition, depreciation and disposal costs of tractors and trailers. It had to include all of the pertinent metrics for asset availability, uti- lization, velocity, throughput and more, Mead says. To develop the system, Seibenhener and his IT department used the Microso BI stack to create a data warehouse, data cubes and analytical processes that take transactional data from various sources and transform it to smart, fast and con- sumable information. In addition to developing the new so ware, Seibenhener and Mead also had to get the stakeholders in operations and maintenance to agree on standard de ni- tions for data. Once the de nitions were settled and all of the necessary information was in one place, the company began to drive new e ciencies "by not continuing to operate in silos," he says. Business intelligence e new BI application's user interface consists of a portal with various reports. e interface was developed using a Mi- croso Sharepoint dashboard and report center, Seibenhener says. U.S. Xpress drives fleet maintenance to the next level with business intelligence BY AARON HUFF G erry Mead can monitor the key performance metrics of his job at any time, inside or outside the o ce. He pays especially close attention to the number of trucks in the shop that are beyond their promised due dates. is type of information was not available to Mead when he came to U.S. Xpress almost four years ago. At the time, the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based truckload carrier (CCJ Top 250, No. 14) had plenty of information, he says, but "you had to go to people and ask for it." In 2014, U.S. Xpress began to apply Lean and Six Sigma management practices throughout the organization. Mead, senior vice president of eet maintenance, joined a steering committee of executives responsible for selecting projects and providing direc- tion for continuous improvement initiatives. e Continuous Improvement steering committee wanted to eliminate the "time wasters" and "lag points" that kept trucks on the sidelines. However, the time and e ort it took to identify which trucks were in the shop on any given day, and how long they had been sitting, was "beyond enormous," he says. is and other shortfalls in report- ing information were a result of having disparate IT systems and databases. Another problem: e information being shared among departments lacked standard de nitions. A report might show the number of "dispatched" and "not dis- patched" trucks. e same terms had di erent meanings to people in operations and maintenance, and it wasn't always clear who was responsible to get "not dispatched" trucks moving. "Everyone had their own things going on," says Mead. Getting the CIO involved In 2015, Mead began working with Je Seibenhener, U.S. Xpress' chief information o cer, as part of the continuous improvement e orts. With other resources and The truckload hauler devel- ops a system to increase equipment utilization while reducing expenses.

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