KM EARNS “STAR RATING” in travel, transportation markets

Helping small transport firms compete

Small, regional transportation carriers need every edge they can get to compete with the large national carriers. One of the major challenges they face is the knowledge management necessary to handle different aspects of the workforce, making sure they have the drivers they need without having a lot of additional drivers, proper logging of time worked and payroll applications, especially when dealing with a workforce of drivers, dockworkers and warehouse personnel, many of whom work remotely.

“The industry is changing. There’s a driver shortage and fuel pricing concerns,” says Michael Zupon, director of management information systems for Ward Transport & Logistics, a regional firm based in Pennsylvania. “Our old workforce management system was cumbersome and didn’t work well outside of Pennsylvania.”

Zupon adds, “The majority of our workers are remote, spread across different locations, and we needed a flexible, easy-to-use workforce management solution that could capture all of our employee information in one place.”

So after vetting four potential vendors, Ward Transport switched to the Kronos Workforce Central suite of workforce management systems.

Prior to Kronos, Ward Transport did not have a way to accurately track multiple jobs with different pay codes, forcing the company to rely on generalizations, rather than on known data. Ward Transport now has access to real-time data that can help measure daily productivity and performance, helping the organization make more informed business decisions.

“Kronos works with drivers who are logging in and out on tablets, and it records orders, mileage and driver status,” Zupon says. “It’s very adaptive for any size workforce. We can get driver retention information and integration of day-to-day performance. Our legacy system was very difficult to use. We would only get basic, historical information. Now we have real-time information and day-to-day reporting. We’re small, we need to be able to adapt on a daily basis. For example, we don’t want 15 drivers coming in when we only need 10. Kronos helps us determine our workforce needs.”

Ward Transport recently started migrating to Kronos’ cloud-based offering. The cloud is more secure because only authorized personnel can access the information, according to to Zupon, who adds, “Every time a human is involved, there is potential for a security breach.” All suite modules are expected to be in the cloud by the end of the year.

Hospitality and transportation firms will be relying on knowledge management solutions in the future for marketing, document handling and retrieval, workforce management and a host of other needs.