Burlington, MA January 8, 2002 In the fiercely competitive transportation and logistics industry, Trimac Corp. needed a technology solution to help it achieve continuous process improvement to offset industry cost increases and to strengthen their customer relationships by adding value to their current service offering.
Trimac, founded in 1945, is a top North American provider of bulk materials transportation and logistics services, with a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles, 6,000 employees and 2000 revenues of $438 million.
In its quest for continuous process improvement and added value for its customers, Trimac turned to Cognos, a provider of business intelligence solutions, to equip its employees and customers with data analysis and reporting capabilities. Trimac integrated Cognos' Impromptu Web Reports and PowerPlay solutions into its dispatch system, allowing the company to compare actual trip data to engineered trip standards to look for process improvements that reduce costs and enhance customer service.
Trip standards examine factors such as equipment utilization, based on equipment or customer, by reviewing variables such as load/unload times, distance traveled and gross vehicle weight.
"With Cognos, we can drill down and compare the actual trip information to what we have committed to our customers, which improves the value of the total logistics chain," said Ted Barnicoat, chief information officer at Trimac.
Barnicoat said that the Cognos solution will produce an estimated $2 million in reduced costs this year.
Trimac's 130 terminals across North America are also using Cognos. Branch managers use business intelligence to measure key performance indicators (KPI's), like determining whether Trimac is meeting revenue per mile estimate. Using Impromptu Web Reports, managers can develop reports based on these KPI's that can be shared throughout the company. "Cognos enables managers to measure and improve the performance and productivity of their terminals and regions," Barnicoat said.
By the end of 2002 Trimac hopes to provide customers access to online reports via a secure extranet so that they may perform their own multidimensional analysis on their logistics data.
