CTI: The Road Ahead
Operations Executive Spotlight
Written by Deborah Geering   
Monday, 01 October 2007
rp CTI: The Road Ahead - Operations Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Change is constant at this technically savvy trucking company.
For a trucking company that’s been in business since the 1930s, the choice for metaphor seems obvious enough: a straight, smooth highway stretching toward the horizon. Unless the company happens to be CTI, Inc., and the leadership team happens to include vice president Shandy Copening.

“Our management team is all about change,” said 35-year-old Copening. “Every day, I encourage people to come in knowing that something is going to be completely different.”

For CTI, a better metaphor might be a rolling, branching road with options at every turn. In recent years, the company has updated its fleet, added technology, rethought its dispatch process, changed its maintenance routines, and adapted services to suit the needs of its best customers.

CTI: The Road Ahead - Operations Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Shandy Copening, President
“Our marketplace is extremely dynamic,” Copening said. “I have a young-thinking management team, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. We are an innovative team and very aggressive. We have adapted well to technology and have incorporated it into our fleet.”

A few years ago the company, which specializes in transporting bulk materials such as concrete, combustible coal, fly ash, and limestone, replaced a third of its 400-unit fleet with Kenworth T800 Day Cabs. Any units older than ’93, Copening said, were auctioned off. Now, the average year of the CTI fleet is 2000.

With the updated fleet came an opportunity to update the company culture regarding maintenance. “We had no defined standards of maintaining our equipment,” said the three-year vice president, who after expressing an interest in CTI’s upper management worked in various shop positions to learn the trade. Drivers used their discretion about when to bring in units for repairs, often waiting until a situation had become critical.

CTI’s management team reached out to the American Trucking Association for guidance, and the company ultimately hired a consultant to help develop maintenance standards for the CTI fleet. That meant more than creating a checklist and issuing new policies. Drivers, shop workers, and administrators had to change the way they thought about equipment care, including an increased investment in maintenance cost and downtime for equipment that was not “broken.”

“We challenged ourselves,” Copening said. “It was the cultural change that was one of the most difficult things, but we now have a procedure in place that all of our shops adhere to. We’re maintaining our equipment on the front end, not the back end, and we’re dealing with fewer and fewer maintenance issues.”

But the road to improvement was not always smooth. The current maintenance interval sheet lists more than 25 items, bringing units into the shop every 20,000 miles. “We could see a unit in just a couple of months,” Copening said. Some employees could not accept the new policies, and they and CTI ultimately parted company.

Keeping track
CTI has updated the technology inside the cabs as well. For years, drivers kept paper logs of their hours and mileage. For a company operating 24 hours a day and handling more than 2,000 loads a week, the paperwork was overwhelming.

Five years ago, CTI contracted with Truckmate Systems (now TMW Systems) to install dispatch and logistics software in its entire fleet. Two years ago, it added an interface with the PeopleNet fleet tracking system, which employs GPS technology to accurately record drivers’ hours and send load instructions electronically. The multimillion-dollar investment enables the company to maximize efficiency and stay in compliance with safety laws.

“Today, when drivers start their shift, they log onto a screen installed in the cab that looks like a big Blackberry,” said Copening, who started with CTI out of college as the IT manager. When drivers enter their employee ID, they receive the assignment details of each load: product, origin, and destination points.

“Once they log on, the computer system at PeopleNet begins to record, automatically and seamlessly, the hours of service,” he said. The system does not allow drivers to exceed safety limits. With conventional paper logs, there might have been up to several weeks’ reporting delay on a driver’s weekly hours. “But now we’re managing drivers during the work week, so we know if a driver is outside his hours available, as defined by law. It keeps the roads safer for everyone,” Copening said.

Meanwhile, at company headquarters, the customer service team, dispatch team, and logistics management group work together to take orders from customers, develop the most efficient pickup and delivery routes, and convey that information to drivers via the TMS system. “We look to technology to complement what we do on a regular basis,” he said. That in itself is a feat for a company that achieved great success on an ancient business model. For many years, the company, which was founded by G.L. “Rusty” Gibbons and still run by his son, CEO Gregg Gibbons, held the sole permit to transport concrete in the state of Arizona. “If we didn’t show up, no work was done,” Copening said.

Of course, deregulation eventually changed all of that, and CTI had to learn to adapt and compete. It still dominates the bulk materials market in Arizona and New Mexico, but it has also worked with large clients to develop services to meet their needs—hauling cement for Cemex, for instance.

“We are the carrier with the depth in its organization to adapt to the industry as the market changes. But we also do well with what we’ve always done: the extremely large federally mandated jobs,” the VP said. “We constantly work on synergies within all our facilities, and we’re on the cutting edge of technology.”

Deborah Geering, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , is a freelance writer based in Atlanta.
 
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