A new tool and dashboard to more effectively manage route-delivery drivers has been released by supply-chain consulting and labor management firm TZA. The ProTrack Drivers Labor Management system and the ProTrack Dashboard interactive console were announced at the 2010 Distribution Solutions Conference in Tampa, FL. The solutions are designed to support operations serving the food and beverage, grocery, automotive parts and retail industries.
ProTrack Drivers integrates with any route optimization platform, TZA said. It calculates delivery times for each customer location along the route based on multiple work variables and parameters encountered by drivers at stops along the way. Delivery times calculated by the system are returned to the user’s routing system from more effective route optimization, resulting in a 10-15% reduction in average miles per stop, the company said.
Drivers makes comparisons of actual times required for deliveries at each stop and travel times, against a calculated expected time. The application also interfaces with any time and attendance system to account for all paid hours within an operation.
“Given today’s driver shortages, high fuel prices and increasing customer demands, the delivery performance of individual route drivers at each stop is a critical factor for companies seeking to reduce costs,” said Paul Schweet, senior vp of sales and marketing for TZA.
The ProTrack Dashboard, first introduced in June, will work with the Drivers system to provide key performance indicators and data points relevant to driver performance. For managers, the Dashboard provides a feature-rich and intuitive labor management tool to give interactive, drill-down capability, 3-D visualization, data filtering and animations, said TZA.
“For too long, transportation departments have relied on data-intensive paper summaries gleaned from multiple sources,” Schweet said. “These firms lacked a valuable tool – an easy means to collect and analyze daily, weekly and monthly KPIs of route drivers.”
For employees, he added, ProTrack Dashboard offers a tool enabling managers to sit down with route drivers and use illustrations to graphically show the employee their path to any needed workplace improvements or a means to earn performance-based incentives.
