Transportation All-Stars

IT projects that ease the burden of regulation, whether by organizing a trainload of paperwork or assisting with compliance, mark the leading edge of the transportation industry. These Enterprise All-Star winners have successfully integrated new technologies into complex environments while saving their companies big bucks.

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On the road with J.B. Hunt

This winner revs up with a flexible application architecture that is expected to deliver $30 million in savings over three years.

Introduction WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Education | Financial services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Transportation | Hospitality | More WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | Convergence | E-commerce | Management | Security | Servers | Storage | WAN | Wireless Download complete list of winners John Gallant on being an All-Star

Plan for common, not unique, requirements. That advice, from Tracy Black, vice president of application development at J.B. Hunt Transport, could save you millions.

Black and the application development team at J.B. Hunt's Dedicated Contract Services (DCS) unit came to this realization the hard way. The team went through many ups and downs in a four-year, $6.4 million application development project aimed at addressing a serious problem within DCS - overly complex, decentralized account management. So arduous was the project, dubbed the Pace system, that DCS nearly scrapped it.

But persistence paid off. Today, DCS projects a $30 million, three-year ROI for Pace. And Pace has morphed from a custom-coding project to a flexible, componentized Web services-based system that gives field managers and customers account access anytime, from anywhere.

DCS used the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition framework to build Pace, which runs on a series of BEA Systems' WebLogic application servers. A rules engine from iLog allows DCS to address unique contract parameters. Using the rules engine, field managers can easily create and manage individual accounts. And once DCS develops a rule, it can use it for other accounts, Black says.

J.B. Hunt earns distinction as a 2005 Enterprise All-Star for its dedication to get this project right - and the cost savings and business flexibility the company gains as a result. Via Pace, for example, the financial and operations teams receive alerts on deviations in driver pay and customer billing from negotiated contracts and act quickly to resolve issues.

"In the past these deviations might have gone unnoticed for years," says Kay Palmer, CIO at the Lowell, Ark., trucking company.

The long road

The Pace development project got under way four years ago, as DCS set out to remedy problems arising from business processes instituted long ago.

J.B. Hunt’s All-Star project leader, Tracy Black.

In the 1990s, the DCS unit spurred exponential growth at J.B. Hunt by customizing applications to address each customer's requirements for payroll, billing and management. "Each customer had a unique business model, and we thought that required different and dynamic applications," says Richie Henderson, vice president of marketing strategy and administration for DCS.

While the customization program boosted J.B. Hunt's market share, creating dozens of new accounts, it eventually took a toll on the IT group. By the late 1990s, IT had to manage and update more than 150 remote PC-based accounting systems. "We started to have problems controlling this decentralized environment - it was no longer cost-effective," Henderson says.