Driving Innovation: Iron Mountain's Transportation Performance Reporting Project
IT, Operations and Transportation team up to improve service level delivery to provide customers better service and places company at 47 on the 2011 InformationWeek 500 rankings of country's most innovative technology users.
How do you improve the performance of nearly 2,700 couriers across North America, making hundreds of thousands of pickups and deliveries daily, when drivers and their routes vary so greatly? Some drivers fatigue before others. Some twist to the left to unload; others to the right. Moreover, each faces traffic patterns, weather conditions, customer demands and other elements specific to his route.
Last year, our IT, transportation and operations teams at Iron Mountain used technology to address this challenge and implement a new approach to setting routes and driver schedules. The program, launched in mid-2010, has already begun to yield big results. In just two quarters, the program has saved the company millions of dollars and improved delivery times for customers by eight percent. Here is the story of how we did it.
Iron Mountain Ranks Among the Nation's Most Innovative Users of Technology with TPR
Iron Mountain helps companies around the world to protect, destroy and access their paper and digital information. Serving these customers means delivering the right information at the right time. And for many of our customers, this means they need their information delivered between their offices and ours. Not surprisingly, transportation is critical to our company. It’s also among our largest cost centers. In North America alone, we log 85 million miles annually while driving to more than 750,000 customer locations and maintaining a diverse fleet of over 2,600 cargo vans, mobile shred vehicles and box trucks. Put simply, transportation makes our company move.
In summer 2009, a cross-functional team of IT, operations and transportation pros set out to improve the performance of our fleet by providing company route makers with stronger data and a better understanding of vehicle and driver-specific variables, from weather and traffic to how a courier exits a vehicle or picks up a box of customer materials. We called the project Transportation Performance Reporting, or TPR.
Our fleet operations draws on six separate databases to plan and direct daily routes for our couriers, accounting for customer orders; inventory tracking; route mileage ; and courier working hours. Throughout each day, these six databases also capture route planning and performance data for each courier and then translate the data into reports that compare actual performance against the original plan. While these reports proved useful, managers waited too long to receive them and, when they did, they still lacked a holistic view into courier productivity. TPR project managers knew they’d have to integrate the databases in order to provide supervisors with the real-time feedback necessary for finding cost savings and making process improvement.
But project coordinators faced a steeper challenge than marrying databases to provide one, integrated report. The route plans did not account for variable elements like traffic patterns, customer locations, courier fatigue, weather conditions and more. This was no good; each of these elements could disrupt the daily plans and skew productivity performance.
First, the team set out to integrate the six systems at the heart of our transportation data infrastructure. Because the systems were a mix of homegrown technology and those gained through acquisitions, IT could find no easy path to integrate the systems. We had made prior investments in these systems in an attempt to create metadata-based models for reporting, but even those upgrades were unsuccessful in providing single view reporting.
To plot that path, our IT team needed to understand each system’s technology foundation. From there, the team built models to rationalize the data sets to feed into one reporting system. They identified common types of data like inventory delivery or pick-up that each system recorded differently.
Meanwhile, our transportation team set out to understand our couriers and the “human” aspects of service delivery. The team used the Management Operation Sequence Technique, or MOST system, while observing the work of couriers and service personnel, breaking down their jobs into checklists of specific actions and movements, along with the expected time it should take to complete each task. Next, they conducted “ride alongs” with couriers in a dozen markets of all sizes, from suburban to crowded urban locations, recording their performance against the checklist.
Couriers demonstrated for observers their process for loading trucks, scanning materials, navigating traffic, unloading customer materials and other aspects to their job. Using video to match field observation with the checklists, observers recorded and analyzed any deviations or exceptions – regardless of when or why they took place – to determine if they were out of our control (traffic and customer delays) or within our control (driver fatigue and vehicle malfunctions).
This field study fundamentally changed our approach to route and schedule planning. Instead of creating all routes and schedules equally, route planners could now account for customer location, delivery volumes and other variables.
Once we completed this field observation period, our teams worked together to design a portal for accessing and reporting data to show performance against those route plans. Launched in May 2010, this portal was immediately successful in providing our field managers with information on how they were performing against plan. Appetite for the information soon grew to the point where they were requesting a 24-hour turnaround for performance data. And, although that wasn’t the initial plan, we were able to satisfy this appetite for near real-time data.
The TPR project has produced bigger benefits than expected, meeting initial annual cost savings estimates in just six months and enabling us to significantly delivery and fleet performance metrics. Thanks to TPR, our fleet moves faster and more efficiently than before. And our customers who reap the biggest benefits of all: Better service.
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