Trucking Web Site Answers the Question: Where's My Stuff?

Software Magazine, August, 2001 by Elizabeth U. Harding

THANKS TO A NEW WEB SITE, customers of Anderson Trucking can now track their freight's progress across the country from the point of departure to the point of arrival, in real time. A customer, for instance, can go online, click on his or her load for location, and get an instant reply of the whereabouts of the truck carrying the load-for example, 11.3 miles west of Kalispell, Mont. In case the customer doesn't know where Kalispell is, another click will reveal a larger city nearby.

Anderson Trucking, St. Cloud, Minn., a leading provider of flatbed and specialized transportation in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Europe, utilized e-commerce applications from BroadVision Inc., Redwood City, Calif., to deploy this dynamic site. The site offers customers and owner/operators a wide range of personalized information, logistics, and e-business services in the trucking industry. One of the site's most popular features is its Load Tracking function.

"We wanted to give our customers 24x7 access to information about their loads," says Larry Weston, Anderson Trucking e-commerce manager. "We use a global positioning satellite that puts information into a database we access. Our customer can put in the town where the load is supposed to be delivered, and our system calculates back where the truck is and how many more miles it has to travel."

According to Weston, developing the Web site utilizing BroadVision took three people 14 weeks to get the site up.

"BroadVision made it easy for us to quickly deploy a site that offers all the features and functionality we needed," says Weston. "It is a robust product that we won't outgrow immediately. It will keep changing as our needs change."

In addition to giving customers the ability to track their loads, the new Web site provides a tool for the Anderson Trucking sales team to interface with customers Weston says.