When Canada Cartage, an outsourced trucking fleet manager company, realized its operations management team’s time was largely being consumed by creating reports, the company turned to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) business partner, Shea Business Solutions for help.
Canada Cartage is a Mississauga, Ont.-based trucking solutions provider that offers trucking services to customers such as Shoppers Drug Mart, Canadian Tire and Sobeys. Mike Knorr, the chief operating officer at Canada Cartage, said the company’s fleet of 2,200 trucks make thousands of deliveries everyday across Canada and the U.S, from distribution centres to the retail stores and back.
Knorr said previously, the company and its operations staff had no real way of tracking productivity levels and generating and creating reports. The lack of proper reporting processes led Canada Cartage to seek help from Shea Business Solutions and Microsoft technology.
“The operations staff were often going through time sheets and creating reports and it was hard to get proper reporting in,” Knorr explained. “Instead of going out and meeting with the drivers and customers and discussing issues with them, the operations managers were spending a lot of their time creating reports.”
Knorr said with increased competition and new competitors in the trucking transportation marketplace, Canada Cartage wanted to find a solution that would also help further set its business and service levels apart from others.
Canada Cartage approached local solutions provider, Shea Business Solutions, a Microsoft registered partner, for help in implementing a solutions platform. This platform would later serve as a foundation for a customer service and internal-report generation system solution, also known as Onboard View.
Jeff Hunt, CEO of Shea Business Solutions, said the company implemented the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database software to provide Canada Cartage with access to analysis, integration and business intelligence services.
The implementation process began last year and took about two months, Hunt said.
Using SQL Server 2008 as a platform for business intelligence and reporting capabilities, Canada Cartage’s internal team of IT staff developed the Onboard View system, Knorr said. Onboard View acts as a driver and customer visibility tool as well as a driver safety tool, he added.
“Onboard is a means of tracking all of our trucks, drivers and driver safety,” Knorr said. “Customers can also use a customer portal to see key performance indicators (KPIs) and other measurements. They can see the progress of the trucks and where they’re going and they can also calculate the estimated time of arrival of the trucks.”
Before implementing Microsoft technology and the Onboard View system, Knorr said there were about 15 operations employees who were involved in completing reporting tasks. Now, Canada Cartage has a five-person group of dedicated staff members who are responsible for generating reports. Report generation, which used to take days, now takes only five minutes, therefore allowing operations managers to get data out faster.
Moving forward, Knorr said the company is looking to fully integrate the Onboard View system with Microsoft SharePoint to facilitate more visibility and collaboration inside of the organization.
“This will be our next phase (of the solution) in 2010,” Knorr said.
Hunt said with the integration of SharePoint, organizations are also able to work with other business partners such as, customers or suppliers, to share reporting statistics.
“With a portal strategy, SQL Server integrates quite easily into the SharePoint platform,” Hunt said.
Michael McKee, director at Shea Business Solutions, said SQL Server 2008 is overall, a better performance management solution because using its “rich database, analysis and integration service capabilities, users can pull information from essentially any data source so they can spend less time on operations and more time elsewhere in the business.”
