LTL Windows Applications

Claims Tracking

This software was created to track claims filed for missing or damaged freight. There are regulatory requirements that must be followed within certain time frames by the trucking company. Multiple claims may be filed (insurance company, shipper, consignee) but only one may be paid. Reports were created to assess which terminals, types of shipments, and so forth had excessive claims. This replaced a paper and Excel spreadsheet based system.

Inbound Planning

This was developed for an overnight trucking company. Planners at each terminal need to see what freight is coming into their terminal and final destination. They need to know enough details about the freight (weight, how many pieces, whether it's hazardous, etc.) to know how to plan the loading of the delivery truck. They need to know what's arriving when, so things can be unloaded and loaded in the "best" order (least handling). Ideally, a shipment should come off one truck and go straight to the loading area of the delivery truck. This was a replacement for a paper-based system, requiring 2-3 planners at each terminal working feverishly all night, creating "books" (delivery loads) by stacking shipment manifests.

Workload

This was a redesign of an existing application. In this department, multiple data entry clerks enter data from a scanned manifest. Scanning is done at the outbound terminal in roughly the order shipments leave. Data entry needs to be done prior to the shipments arriving at the inbound terminal (see Inbound Planning above). In the original application, supervisors had to have multiple instantiations of the program running with each showing a slightly different view; they manually calculated various things to determine when to assign data entry clerks to different workloads in order to meet their time commitments. They could never see everything they needed to at the same time on a single screen. In the new application, they can monitor progress and see which areas need attention, how much work is left for the evening, in which areas the data entry clerks are currently working, and adjust things as needed to meet the evening's demands. In addition, the company was growing and adding terminals and needed an application that could grow with them.

Pickup and Delivery Data Entry

The goal of this application was to provide a means to capture data regarding pickups and deliveries without modifying the existing database structure so that various reports could be created and performance in various areas improved. In the ideal world, the database issues would have been resolved. In the real world, we worked around them and provided a means to capture the data they needed and create the requested reports.