Keeping an eye on the road: James Stevenson, Appian Logistics executive vice president, shares how routing trucks and tracking their progress via GPS can streamline deliveries and service calls.

JAMES STEVENSON is executive vice president of Appian Logistics, a leading provider of logistics software solutions for the transportation industry. James has more than 15 years of experience in the geographic information system (GIS) industry, with his primary focus being its application in logistics, routing/scheduling, and vehicle tracking. Having held positions in data production, software development, product management, and software sales, James has a wide variety of technical expertise and industry knowledge. His tenure has seen more than 300 logistics software implementations in industries across the service, manufacturing, and distribution supply chain.

ADVISOR: If a company wants to implement a routing and tracking system for more efficient fleet management, what basic components do they need?

STEVENSON: First, they have to write an interface from the system that's holding their orders, sales tickets, etc. I call it the Who, What, When, and Where. Who needs something done, whether it's a delivery or a service call. What's being done, or what's being delivered. When--that's the time component or delivery window. And there's obviously the address.

From there, the system locates the customers on the map and builds a route given the constraints around what's required to complete that set of tickets. The output is a detailed schedule directing a driver to leave at say 7:15, drive 22 miles, and arrive at the first stop at 8:00. The driver should be there from 8:00 to 8:22, drive 1.4 miles and get to the next stop at 8:31, and so on. You're building the schedule for the day.

ADVISOR: What other information does the system take into account?

STEVENSON: There are several other details, for example, what the truck is hauling or what's being done. You need to know weight, cube, pallets, or some kind of volume data so you know when the truck is full. You also have to know how long the stop will take; we call this the stop time. You just load the variables for how long certain elements of the stop will take, and the system automatically calculates the stop time.

You also have to take special equipment into account or in the service business driver skill sets. Maybe you need a special kind of truck, say a truck with a side door; or, maybe it needs to be a truck with a lift gate because the location doesn't have a loading dock.

The system takes this information and generates a plan for what stops go on what trucks, and what sequence will optimize the distribution. You can also use that information for the loading operation and generate pick tickets so the people in the warehouse can pull the product and load the trucks. If it's a service company, they'll usually print this information from the routing system along with the manifest, directions, maps, etc.

ADVISOR: How has the routing industry evolved over the last couple of years?

STEVENSON: In the past, the trucks used onboard computer systems to monitor all kinds of things: engine RPMs, braking, arrival and departure information, etc. These on-board systems were essentially computers with GPS antennas mounted in the truck. The majority of those systems used end-of-day batch transfers: At the end of the day, back at the yard, the system transferred all the data back to the main system. This let you look at the plans for yesterday and compare those against the actual data.

But, there's a paradigm shift going on because of how cell phone technology has reduced communications costs. At one point, those sophisticated on-board systems were necessary because the cost of communication was so high you had to do all that computing on the truck. Now, although phones do contain small computers, they still don't have significant computing resources. So, we've made it so the phone passes the data back to the system and we do all the computing on the server. The communications prices are such that I can transfer the data inexpensively enough to do this. With our system, you're only transferring 1MB of data a month. The trick is knowing what data to transmit--you have to be smart about it.

ADVISOR: What do you get from the standard on-board system versus handling the tracking via mobile phone?

STEVENSON: A standard on-board system is $1,500 to $4,000 per truck. There are many benefits of the system such as monitoring acceleration, braking, and capturing OS&D. However, most of the data is being transmitted at the end of day. To add real-time communication you're looking at another $35+ per month per truck. Also, that communication typically isn't updating the schedule in real time but rather showing where the driver is on a map and possibly passing some stop information back. Some systems have a messaging option but adding a handset to call the driver adds cost.

If you look at the cell phone option--for example, Nextel--you're paying for a phone handset for each truck, roughly $13 per month for the Nextel data package, plus whatever minutes you want to buy. But, most companies don't have to buy a lot of minutes. A majority of the calls they were making were to find out where the truck was. The tracking and routing system eliminates that need.

ADVISOR: How does the GPS service work on the Nextel phone? Does the GPS polling process use minutes?

STEVENSON: You aren't using minutes for this; it's part of the data plan. A 1MB data plan is $9.99 a month. The 5MB plan is something like $20 dollars a month. You can run our system with the 1MB-per-month plan.

There's one other component you need and that's an open IP address for each phone. An open IP address lets you push configuration changes out to the phone, as well as request immediate data. If you don't have an open IP address, the system can't find the phone because the IP address isn't published. The open IP address is $3 per month.

We obviously charge for the software on the phone, the Web site hosting, and the routing application.

ADVISOR: Beyond routing the trucks for the day, what other ways can you use this data?

STEVENSON: Having this data streamlines your communication channels. If I'm in customer service and I want to know where a delivery is, I have to call the dispatcher, who then has to call the driver to find out where he is. The dispatcher gets back to me in customer service, so I can call the customer. There are three or fours calls going on here.

We have a Web-based product that interfaces with the routing system and pushes all that information out to a Web site. For example, we own RouteTracking.com. As our customer, you could have www.Advisor.Routetracking.com branded as your Web site, as an example. You can log in, and depending on your level of access, see real-time schedule information. If you have a customer expecting a delivery today, they can go to the Web, type in their customer number or order number, and they'll see the delivery time plus or minus, say, a half hour. You can control the buffer time.

As far as access goes, if your customer is logging in, you might not want them to be able to see if they re the fourth stop on the route, the first stop, or the tenth. All you want them to see is roughly when their delivery is going to be made. The delivery time is updated in real time, and the system lets you update it via multiple communication devices.

If you're logging in as a dispatcher, you can see all the! routes you're running for the day. In the list, you'll see a color! variation (figure 1). The stops in red mean you're forecasting a time window violation. If the delivery has to happen! between 9:00 and noon, the system updates in real time based on the GPS and reforecasts the estimated arrival.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

ADVISOR: You could even be proactive and call your customer to let them know the delivery is going to be late.

STEVENSON: Right, or say I'm a salesperson with a new account and I want to monitor things closely to ensure things start off on the right foot. I can go into the profile for that account, add my contact information, and anytime the system forecasts a time violation for that account, it sends me a text message on my phone.

ADVISOR: When you click on a particular stop in a view, what kind of detail do you get?

STEVENSON: As you drill down, you can get route details. For example, you can get a map for a driver's route for the day (figure 2). If you click on a truck icon, you can see the driver was at a particular spot at 6:48, he was going 69 miles an hour, and he was heading west.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

ADVISOR: Where does that data come from?

STEVENSON: Our software has the Nextel phone polling the satellite at a regular interval. Second, it transmits the stored coordinates back to the Web server every 10-15 minutes.

ADVISOR: How do you get the app on the Nextel phone?

STEVENSON: You buy the application from us. We sell a couple of components. First, there's the back-end application. That s the routing application where you do all your planning. Then, if you want real-time tracking, you need the Web site piece and the application that goes on the Nextel phone.

That phone is polling the satellite every 10-25 seconds getting longitude and latitude and it transmits those coordinates back to the system. The driver doesn't have to do anything but turn on the phone. We have cradles with a suction cup the driver can put in the window, and you can track the truck all day.

ADVISOR: What about when the truck passes through an area where the phone can't get a signal?

STEVENSON: You don't have to worry about whether the phone has a signal. You might not have a signal to pass the data back to the server, but you always have GPS signal to the satellite. So, the phone is still collecting the same data about all the stops, it just doesn't transmit that data back to the system until the truck is back in an area where the phone has a signal.

ADVISOR: What are some things people need to look out for when they're planning a system like this?

STEVENSON: One tricky thing is that the phone inherently can't multi-task. So, what happens when the driver is on the phone? Our guys have written a ton of code to solve some of these issues that would make this a show stopper. Because you use the same communication backbone to talk as you do to send data back to the Web server, you might not be able to send data while the driver is on the phone; but with our system the phone can still ping the satellite, record that data, etc. The data can then be transmitted when the communication channel is open.

ADVISOR: Other than real-time route updates, are there any other benefits?

STEVENSON: Well, another benefit to the technology is the ability to track driver performance. You can configure the system to generate stop lists--a stop is when the truck hasn't moved within a certain amount of time, whether it's for a delivery, or to get gas, to have lunch whatever. You can also compare planned mileage versus actual mileage, planned route time versus actual route time, etc.

If a company has a fixed customer base--say they're in food service and they're going to a lot of the same customers all the time--the system can learn how long the driver usually spends at these stops and use that data to forecast more accurate routes over time.

You'll see a productivity bump in the drivers just from monitoring. Say you're not using any routing or tracking. You give a driver a route with ten stops and he comes back nine hours later and you figure that's about how long it takes for ten stops. But, if you load that set of stops into the routing system, you'll probably find out it's more like an eight-hour route. Then you've got a goal to work toward.

ADVISOR: The companies can turn it into something positive by setting up incentive programs.

STEVENSON: Right, we have several other customers in various industries that have implemented productivity-based pay. Everything is paid based on driver standards. A particular route might have a standard of xyz, and if the driver is above that standard he gets a performance bonus.

ADVISOR: We've talked about a lot of benefits of routing and tracking, but when companies come to you, what's the number-one problem they're trying to solve?

STEVENSON: If you ask most trucking companies what they're looking for in a system like this, 80 percent of what they want is to just know where their drivers are. The common perception is the driver is the last cowboy. Nobody knows where he is or what he's doing. He just leaves in the morning with a full truck and comes back nine hours later with an empty truck. These companies have no idea whether their drivers are productive or not.