|
|
J.B. Hunt Transportation Services, Inc. In 1969, Johnnie Hunt founded J.B. Hunt Transport Services, a trucking company that has grown into the largest, publicly held truckload transportation company in North America (J.B. Hunt, History). J.B. Hunt does not resist change; it invests and uses technology to increase its bottom line. A key contributor to any transportation company’s bottom line is the efficient utilization of equipment assets. Qualcomm’s OmniTRACS allows J.B. Hunt to track the location of its 11,650 trucks. Terion's FleetView tracks the location of Hunt’s 11,000 trailers, whether or not they are tethered to a truck. Both systems allow J.B. Hunt to locate and dispatch its vehicle assets quickly and efficiently without ever leaving corporate headquarters. Johnnie Bryant Hunt was born in 1927. He grew up working in the cotton fields. At the age of 12, Hunt left school and went to work in his uncle’s sawmill. “In the years that followed he picked cotton, harvested grain, sold lumber, auctioned livestock, drove a truck, sold lawn sod, invented a rice hull press, designed and built a specialty poultry truck, started several businesses, lost thousands of dollars, and made millions more (J.B. Hunt, History).” One of the companies Hunt established was J.B. Hunt Transport. J.B. Hunt Transport began with only five trucks and seven refrigerated trailers. In 1983, when J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange (JBHT), the Hunt family sold their rice hull business to concentrate on the trucking company. By 2000, Hunt was operating 10,650 tractors, 44,310 trailers and employed 15,980 people. Throughout it’s history, J.B. Hunt has received many awards for its use of technology: 1997: Computer World honors J.B. Hunt as a “Top 100 Premier Internet Users” as well as “Top Places to Work in IT” and “Top 16 IT Training Shops. They received the prestigious User Excellence Award from Network World magazine. 1999: Wal-Mart names J.B. Hunt “Truckload Carrier of the year.” Dayton Hudson honors J.B. Hunt with three “Commitment to Quality” awards to performance. 2001: Computer World selects J.B. Hunt as a “Top 100 Places to Work in IT” for the fifth year. J.B. Hunt Services is currently based in Lowell, Arkansas and has numerous locations throughout the Midwest and East Coast. What started as a small, trucking company owned by a young man from Arkansas, has turned into a multi-billion dollar company. In 2000 J.B. Hunt’s revenue increased to a record $2 billion (J. B. Hunt, Terion). One of the primary reasons J.B. Hunt has grown and succeeded over the past thirty-two years is due too continued investments in technology. To achieve growth and success in the transportation industry, J.B. Hunt invested in state of the art, vehicle-tracking systems. In 1992, Hunt began installation of the first of these systems. Hunt is currently using Qualcomm’s OmniTRACS to track it’s truck fleet and communicate with drivers. And recently, Hunt began the installation of Terion’s FleetView to track its trailers separately from the trucks. Qualcomm’s Wireless Business Division offers OmniTRACS, one of the world’s leading mobile information systems. Transportation companies use OmniTRACS to monitor the location and movement of their fleet using real-time, GPS data. The system consists of two segments: an onboard driver interface and an Antenna Communication Unit (ACU). Network management services are provided directly by Qualcomm and application software is installed on all field units (Qualcomm, OmniTRACS). OmniTRACS serves more than 800 carriers with a combined fleet of almost 300,000 trucks (Qualcomm, Press). OmniTRACS Online provides wireless tracking of real-time freight data via the Internet. OmniTRACS Online is a web-based system that provides customers and carriers anytime, anywhere vehicle location, load status and mapping. The application was written and runs in a pure Microsoft® environment, featuring the Microsoft Windows® Distributed Internet Application (DNA) architecture with Component Object Model (COM) technology. The application is capable of scaling to handle two million database transactions per day, per carrier. This represents tracking activities for approximately 100,000 trucks per carrier (Microsoft 1). OmniTRACS provides trucking companies with a cost-effective way to improve customer service. It gives customers real-time, freight location data so they can do better dock and resource planning at each receiving location. OmniTRACS Online also gives customers a consistent, browser-based interface to monitor incoming, tracking data from multiple carriers (Microsoft 2). This information solution was built in six months (ITSA). Qualcomm briefly considered a Solaris/UNIX operating system and AS/400 servers but determined those platforms were not well represented within its target industries including business geographies such as Brazil and Mexico. Also, Qualcomm developers felt that the Web technologies available from Microsoft were more evolved. "In our opinion, Microsoft is at the forefront of Web technologies," explains John Harvey, lead engineer on the project within Qualcomm’s Wireless Business Division (Microsoft 2).
|
