our company, and be as safe as we can be each and every day,” he said. USA Truck, which operates 1,700
trucks, made the switch from paper logs to ELDs during the course of 2014. Company executives believed a mandate was coming and wanted to get ahead of the curve rather than be forced to adapt in the face of a deadline, said Alicia Black, compliance safety manager, and Les Bicknell, director of applications development.
Like Dedicated Logistics, USA Truck
made the switch while on alert status. Its hours-of-service CSA score was 67, which was two points higher than the threshold of 65. Since its installation was completed, its score has improved to 41.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE Getting out of alert status helps the
company avoid a lot of unwanted atten- tion by regulators, and it also helps the company from a business perspective, said Black. Shippers want to know that a carrier is safe, dependable and compliant. “CSA is basically tied to everything.
It’s tied to your customer pool, so your customers are definitely going to have a lot more interest in you as a customer the lower that your CSA scores are,” she said. That competitive advantage was
part of the thinking of Zero Mountain Logistics, which never had to switch to ELDs because it’s never used anything else. The carrier is an outgrowth of Zero Mountain, a cold storage facility that has been in business since 1955. Zero Mountain Logistics operates 46 trucks with 114 reefer trailers. When it was incorporated in July 2014, it decided to use ELDs from the beginning and use it as a selling point to its food-based customers who appreciate the ability to log in and track a load from pickup to destination. “We’re selling that we’re going to
be aboveboard to the customers that we’re working with on a day-to-day basis,” said Michael Francks, general
manager. “So it’s expected, and if our customers ask us to do things that we can’t do, I’m not afraid to say, ‘Hey, you either need a team for that, or we can’t do it.’” Francks said company leaders
believed the carrier would have an advantage by adopting the technology from the beginning, over its competi- tors who would have to adapt to it from paper logs. “When we started our company,
this was a direction that we knew was coming, we felt was coming, and we wanted to capitalize on potential issues that might come up from a capacity standpoint for individuals that might not want to adapt to this technology,” said Francks. There are also practical reasons for
making the switch. USA Truck’s Black said the company believed that ELDs would make operations run more effi- ciently. Hours-of-service processes can be interjected into load optimization software, making the company bet- ter able to match loads to drivers. For Zero Mountain Logistics, ELDs help the company with all of its planning. Because it’s automated, the fleet man- ager doesn’t have to track when trucks arrive and depart manually. The tech- nology proved so advantageous that, by October 2015, the carrier installed it on its trucks driving local routes that were well within the mandate’s 100 air-mile exemption. It helps with planning, it ensures all drivers are trained on the technology, and it ensures those local trucks are available for long-haul oppor- tunities.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK That ability to incorporate ELDs
into a carrier’s fleet management sys- tems, rather than simply as a regulatory compliance tool, is one of its biggest advantages. Hanna Helein with the transportation services and products firm J.J. Keller & Associates said private fleets have been the early adopters of ELD technology and have seen good results. Devices can capture input from
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