Closer Than They Appear

With its home-grown system, called Integrated Fleet Solutions, the company expects to at least double its 5 percent piece of the local dedicated-fleet market, a market Wintz estimates to be “well in excess of $100 million.” Dedicated Logistics also plans to introduce its technology in other markets, starting with this year’s rollout in Chicago. The company’s current share of the Chicago market is “not even close to 1 percent,” Wintz says, but he believes he could grab 5 percent to 10 percent of that estimated $1 billion opportunity within a year.

Indeed, Integrated Fleet Solutions could become an industry standard for increasing local-delivery efficiency. Funny that no one saw this approach before.

Insights From Blindness

Wintz’s parents knew almost from his birth that their son couldn’t see well. “My dad would throw me a tennis ball and it would just bounce off my head,” Wintz recalls. “I would crawl into open car doors or trees.”

On top of that, he had no color vision. An eye doctor measured his childhood visual acuity at 20/200—in other words, legally blind. He was given bifocals and a pair of reading glasses with lenses an inch-and-a-half thick, although he did most of his studying with audio books. Wintz sees least well in bright daylight, so he keeps his office dimly lit. He equates his vision to the earliest versions of digital cameras. “It’s like my retina doesn’t get 5 mega-pixels—it gets 0.5 mega-pixels,” Wintz says. “It’s like a picture of a license plate, but you can’t read the license plate. The fine detail isn’t there.”

You wouldn’t guess Wintz had a vision problem unless you saw him read, write, or look at a computer screen—he has to get quite close to text in order to read it. But as a kid, his cola-bottle lenses constantly made people expect less of him. “From a very early age, people told me ‘You can’t do this’ or ‘You can’t do that,’” he says. “And that didn’t set well with me.”

He pushed himself, learning not only to wrestle but also to shoot, downhill ski, and scuba dive. He couldn’t get behind the wheel of a big rig at Wintz Companies, his father’s trucking operation, but he could install computers and other technology for the company even before he had entered high school.

Later, while studying marketing at the University of St. Thomas, Wintz noticed that he could see his textbook better without his bifocals. He paid a visit to Rochester’s Mayo Clinic to find out why. He soon found himself surrounded by curious ophthalmologists, all eager to see one of five known cases of hemeralopia, or day blindness. “The doctors said, ‘You have no cone function,’” Wintz recalls. Cones are photoreceptors in the eye that control color vision, focus on fine detail, and adjust for daylight. Wintz’s night and peripheral vision are normal. Although doctors said he could stop wearing the thick glasses, they couldn’t offer him a cure or even corrective lenses. “They said ‘It’s so rare that nobody’s going to be studying it,’” Wintz recalls. “‘So you’re kind of on your own.’”

After college, Wintz went to work for his father until 1995, when he bought part of Wintz Companies to launch Dedicated Logistics. To stand out from other trucking logistics firms, Wintz positioned his business as a company with the high-tech know-how to increase customers’ efficiency.

Despite standard technology like cross-country satellite tracking of trucks, many carriers still don’t apply technology to other aspects of their business. A 2002 survey by the Logistics Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta found that 61 percent to 72 percent of private and dedicated fleets still do tracking, dispatching, load building, and route planning by hand using maps and sheets of paper, despite the availability of commercial software packages. That may be due in large part to the nature of the industry, which has numerous small operators.

“Although the technology is widely available, most of it is fairly limited in what it can do, and trucking companies have to do a fair amount of work to make it work exactly the way they want it to,” observes Anton Kleywegt, a Georgia Tech associate professor who studies the application of technology in transportation industries. “For the typical trucking company, that’s the real challenge. Especially most smaller companies, [which] don’t have the people to do the customization.”

Wintz’s emphasis on technology has allowed Dedicated Logistics to compete against larger carriers. Early on, the company was shipping parts from General Motors’ distribution center in Edina. It hoped to expand that business to GM parts centers in Chicago and St. Louis. But that meant competing against some much bigger companies.