Land Air Express in the News
Table of Contents
Vermont Names Land Air Employees "Highway Heroes" For Child Safety
Kids 'n Trucks Foundation Makes a Difference
Land Air Express Puts Mobiles in Trucks
New England Carrier Embraces Technology
Vermont Names Land Air Employees "Highway Heroes"
- Transport Topics
Land Air Express of New England's Thomas Spencer and Brian Dunsmore have been designated "highway heroes" by Vermont's Governor's Highway Safety Program for their work in passenger protection for children.
GHSP's Kids in Safety Seats (KISS) program aggressively advertises the importance of child seat restraints through the age of seven. The agency also purchase and solicits thousand of car and booster seats for distribution to needy families.
Land Air Express, Williston, Vt., provides free warehousing and trucking services to the KISS program. Spencer, Administrative Vice President, and Dunmsore, warehouse manager, coordinate Land Air's efforts, which includes delivering the safety equipment to health department distribution sites throughout the state.
"GHSP is a small state office. We count on our partners, people like Tom and Brian, to get the work done." said Jeannie Johnson, coordinator of GHSP. "They do a terrific job."
Johnson says the agency makes a special effort once a year to recognize the state's highway heroes. "Without them, we could never achieve the gains over the years that have made in highway safety," she said.
Land Air Express also administers other company-sponsored child safety programs - including donation and distribution of free bicycle helmets for children each spring and free gun locks to hunters each autumn. The Company and its employees have contributed more than $100,000 to children's programs over the past three years through an employee payroll deduction plan and matching contribution from the company.
Land Air Express is a regional truckload and LTL carrier serving New England, upstate New York and northern New Jersey.
Kids 'n Trucks Foundation Makes a Difference
| The kids 'n trucks Foundation is made up of the employees and friends of Land Air Express who donate their time and resources to making a difference. We make charitable contributions to organizations who concentrate on the well being of children. |
Check out our
"kids n trucks" web site
|
 |
Land Air Express Puts Mobiles in Trucks
Information is as important as delivery in the $62 billion dollar Less Than Load (LTL) carrier transportation market. Once freight leaves the shippers dock, shipment activity and location is vital for customer satisfaction. Technology is the key to push shipment data directly to customers. Today, KonaWare, a leading provider of logistics and motor freight applications, announces that Land Air Express of New England (Land Air) has selected KonaWare's Mobile T&L Suite product for its 200 - 250 units. Land Air direct customers include such shippers as LL Bean, Yankee Candle, WW Grainger, Rossignal, Country Home Products, and Vermont Country Store, as well as over sixty commercial LTL carriers.
Determined to position Land Air as the Northeast's primary LTL carrier, Tom Spencer, Vice President of Administration, evaluated mobile capability of handhelds with GPS, and fixed in-cab systems. Spencer found the cost for a fixed system was $4,000 plus installation per truck - a whopping $800,000.
"KonaWare's mobile solution will not overextend us and ultimately KonaWare's extraordinary vision made the choice easy," states Spencer. "KonaWare saw that technology would revolutionize the trucking industry, they focused on LTL requirements, and created a product that increases the return on investment for midsized companies."
"Shippers want immediate access to pick-up and delivery times, freight location, signature capture, RFID and bar code scan, and data delivered to their desktop," said Jim DiSanto, KonaWare CEO. "KonaWare's Mobile T&L Suite allows carriers to use a Java 2 phone or Hewlett-Packard Company PocketPC, and leverages existing IT infrastructure."
Land Air Express of New England, founded in Williston, VT in 1968, provides direct next day LTL service from eleven terminals in the Northeast. Full truckload service is available throughout the U.S. and Canada. www.mylandair.com
KonaWare, headquartered in Redwood City, California, provides mobile application platforms for developing and extending mission-critical enterprise applications to a mobile workforce. For more information, visit the company website at www.konaware.com.
New England Carrier Embraces Technology
John Bendel, Technology Editor, Heavy Duty Trucking
When LTL carrier Land Air Express of New England invested in technology, new enterprise software and imaging system, did the updated technology make a difference?
"Absolutely," said Tom Spencer, Land Air's VP of administration.
"Just on the administrative side of things it reduced our labor force tremendously. With my old system, every freight bill was manually rated. The backup, any associated documentation, would be hand-stapled to a freight bill. I was able to eliminate upwards of 10 full-time bodies instantly by going to this system and taking better advantage of our imaging system's power."
And that was just the beginning of the benefits, said Spencer who grew up in the family-owned LTL business. His brother, Bill Spencer, is company president.
"We're a traditional LTL carrier based in Williston, Vt. We were started by my father back in 1968 and have really grown since 1990 and expanded our service from the Vermont market to more of an LTL-driven company throughout New England." According to Spencer, Land Air grew dramatically in the following decade, from two terminals in Vermont and a $1.5 million gross to eight terminals throughout New England. By 2001, Land Air to grossed $30 million and estimates its operating ratio to be under 94. The company employed 350 people.
"We run 80% tractor-trailer units and a few straight jobs, right down to vans. We still do quite a bit of air freight, specifically in the Vermont marketplace. We haul a ton of air freight out of Logan, which sometimes requires the smaller equipment. But we're primarily LTL."
Rapid growth had rendered Land Air's original software system obsolete. "It was a system that was geared more toward a one-terminal environment," Spencer explained.
So the company turned to Acordex Imaging Systems (www.acordex.com), an industry leading developer of imaging systems tuned to the trucking industry, located in West Boxford, Mass. Acordex helped directly by automating all phases of document handling, and also provided consultation in the selection of a new Operations Database.
"Imaging and the database really begin working together the moment the pickup is taken and starts to
generate a freight bill," Spencer said.
Pickup, Consolidate And Deliver
CLI VP Kenneth Weinberg said the core of FACTS2000 is the ROUTRONIC 2000 software for LTL route planning, dispatch and customer service. According to Weinberg, ROUTRONIC enables users to plan delivery routes hours before the freight arrives, factoring in special customer requirements, appointments and more. The ROUTRONIC module generates EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) records as deliveries are made and automatically routes pickup calls to the best unit.
Customer closing times are highlighted and special requirements flagged for dispatchers. ROUTRONIC 2000 logs customer calls and stores customer requirements, enabling virtually anyone in the company to handle a customer inquiry.
Popular With Shippers and Interliners
Spencer said that Acordex provided a web site that has been very popular with customers. Acordex integrated CLI data access and the Acordex image access into Land Air's web site (http://mylandair.com), which has become a more important element of the company's service.
"We are constantly getting compliments on how easy it is to use our web site. The thing we like about the web site is that when you've got the login and the password, you quickly see everything you want to see from one page, from rates to POD to image. Go to some of the big boys, the Roadways of the world, and you've got to go to 8 million different screens to get this information on one shipment," he said.
The web site is cutting down on customer phone inquiries by offering shipment status information.
"That's what people want. We had people call us every single morning for PODs (Proofs of Delivery) and status. Now they go right to the web site, specifically; a lot of our air freight customers like that."
Spencer offered the example of a nearby customer who uses the system to see what shipments Land Air will be bringing in that day. "He pops in his name, says, 'Show me all the bills from yesterday.' Since we are an overnight carrier he knows anything we picked up yesterday is coming in today. So before we arrive he knows exactly what's coming in.
"We didn't want it to be flashy. We wanted to say, 'hey, we're a family-owned business and we're going to keep this simple. Our hits have increased every month since we went live and it's continued to grow, which means people are going to it, using it and coming back again," Spencer said.
The documents customers access on the web site are created by the
imaging system Land Air purchased from Acordex Imaging
Systems. It has been integrated with the enterprise database to provide document
security. Before anyone can see a document, they must be cleared by the database.
Only parties to the shipment get to see
the documents.
"I host it all right in house. It's sitting in a rack right outside my office. We have a high-reliability RAID system that instantly provides the trailing five years worth of documentation. Anyone who doesn't have imaging in this day and age has got to be a dinosaur because it saves so much time," Spencer said. "Documents flow instantly from remote terminals to our home office to the customers."
Managing the Growth
According to Spencer, business picked up substantially as several old-line LTL carriers have shut down in the Northeast. This in turn created opportunity for us to add new terminals.
Improved technology helped Land Air handle the surge in freight with better strategic information. "Our database that enables us to pull service reports or tonnage reports or lane reports in any fashion you can imagine. And the Acordex system handled the added document volume efforlessly, which helps us manage the bottom line," Spencer explained.
Spencer admitted that during the implementation of all of the new technology, he worried about some veteran employees who were so used to paper systems - that they would find the changes difficult. "It took a while. It didn't happen on Day One, but it happened a lot quicker than I thought and with a lot less resistance than I thought. They learned the new database screens within a few weeks. And the imaging system became indispensable within days of its roll-out. We couldn't be where we are today without this technology."
Land Air Express of New England · 800-639-3095