BOCA RATON, FL. Four fleets were presented with PeopleNet’s Innovator of the Year awards last week at the company’s annual User Conference here.
The fleets, the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, Griffin Industries, Old Dominion Freight Line and Huron Services Group, represent organizations that demonstrate leadership in using PeopleNet’s system to create unique solutions that drive ROI, PeopleNet said.
“These awards capture the true spirit of our user conference—shared experiences that help all of our customers get the most out of their technology investment,” said Mark Kessler, vice president of national accounts for PeopleNet as he presented the awards. “We are grateful to Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, Griffin Industries, Old Dominion Freight Line and Huron Services Group for their creative contributions.”
“In trucking, there can be a tendency to spend the whole technology budget on a product,” Ron Konezny, PeopleNet CEO, told Fleet Owner. “In other industries, when they embrace a technology they tend to spend 50% on the product and 50% on implementation. It is really the implementation of a system that makes it truly successful or not.
“At Old Dominion, for instance, the company absolutely takes ownership of their technologies. Their attitude is ‘a system may not be perfect, but it will work. We will make it work,’” he continued. “There is a big, big difference between that and companies that just buy a system and then pick up the phone and want their suppliers to do it all [to make a system work without any real commitment on their part.]. These can-do fleets are the kind of companies we celebrate with our Innovator of the Year award.”
Old Dominion Freight Lines was recognized as an innovator for its use of PeopleNet-based programs to help optimize driver performance and control fuel costs. The extensive dashboard Old Dominion created closely monitors out-of-route miles and miles per gallon for all of its drivers, as well as other comprehensive productivity and safety metrics, PeopleNet noted. The company is also developing a custom integration in which a handheld computer captures pickup and delivery data and sends it to the PeopleNet BLU in-cab displays via WiFi for immediate download to the back office’s tracking system. Old Dominion also designed a comprehensive eDriver Logs training solution to train more than 5,500 drivers on the new system over the course of a year.
Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, which operates 15 trucks, was honored for pioneering the use of mobile communications for non-profit organizations. In-cab navigation, routing, custom forms and PeopleNet Link have increased their productivity, according to PeopleNet. The organization feeds information into their back office applications for collecting and distributing donations most cost-efficiently. Their success is credited with opening the door for other food banks to take advantage of PeopleNet technology, including Harvesters—the Community Food Network (with 29 trucks) and Houston Food Bank (with 30 trucks).
Griffin Industries, which is in the business of reclaiming animal and bakery by-products and restaurant grease and distribution of recycled products, received an innovation award for working with PeopleNet Tailored Solutions to develop a new application that provides timestamp, GPS location, speed and RPM every two seconds to ensure that relevant safety information is captured in the absence of a sudden start, sudden stop or manual onboard event recording event. More than 400 of the company’s PeopleNet-installed trucks use speed monitoring, onboard event recording, eDriver Logs, automated fuel tax, in-cab navigation and automated workflow.
Huron Services Group Limited, a single-source provider of logistics services, was also recognized with an award this year. A pioneer and reference account, the Ontario, Canada-based firm has opened the door for other trucking firms to be successful, PeopleNet noted. The company
has been a long-time PeopleNet partner in innovation and was among the first to robustly integrate with TMW and test and use vehicle management, eDriver logs, and onboard event recording data.
“I would love to see the trucking industry think more about how they implement technology [as these award winners have done so well], “Konezny noted. When considering investing in a new system, it is so important to also ask: How are we going to implement this so that we get the results and realize the ROI we want to see?”
