Closer Than They Appear

Purchasing 100 in-truck PeopleNet units, the company recorded all of its customers’ delivery sites over the course of about six months, establishing a geo-fence for each. PeopleNet also tracked the average pickup and delivery times to create a benchmark for how long trips should take. Finally, Dedicated Logistics employed the programming services of Golden Valley– based Magenic Technologies to design a dispatching interface to connect the satellite tracking and optimization systems together. The whole process took from March 2005 until January 2006 and cost about $3 million, Wintz says, including the purchase last June of a fleet-command center in Roseville.

Wintz believes that his company is the first to use technology to serve local delivery markets this way. John Hausladen, president of the Roseville-based Minnesota Trucking Association, sees a parallel between Dedicated’s technology and what has occurred in the airline industry: “I liken what they’re doing to what American Airlines did with the reservation industry, where they developed a very sophisticated reservation system which . . . has become the standard for the airline industry.”

The new system has allowed Dedicated Logistics to shift from an hourly rate system to a flat rate based on the type of truck and the delivery miles. Now, if a delivery takes longer than the benchmark average, Wintz says, customers will pay extra. The new systems lets customers see immediately if a problem like road construction or a delay in unloading will cost them extra. Customers can also track the status of their loads on the company’s Web site.

Even with the promise of reducing customers’ costs by 10 to 20 percent, Dedicated Logistics feared that it might still be hard to convince them to give up dispatch control. But by January 2006, when the new system went live, nearly all of the company’s 25 customers had signed on. “It’s such a dramatic change from the way people have been doing business,” Wintz says. “They’re hungry to get cost reductions and integrity in the system, and for improved service and less staffing.”

Wintz expects this innovation to give his company an edge over its competitors in service and pricing. In most situations, Wintz believes, Dedicated Logistics should be able to offer cheaper local delivery rates. “Say it takes 90 minutes to pick up and deliver, and another 45 minutes to drive back,” Wintz says. “If we’re eliminating that 45 minutes because we’re sending the truck to another pickup, we only need to be compensated for the hour and a half, whereas our competitor has to be compensated for the whole move.”

The system’s rollout hasn’t been without some glitches. Dedicated Logistics was surprised to learn that some of its customers don’t know until the last minute when their freight can be picked up. “When you’re paying for a truck for a whole day, the pickup window doesn’t matter as much, because whenever the freight is ready, you ship it,” Wintz says. But to fully optimize routes, Dedicated Logistics needs to know pickup times the night before.

“One of our customers said, ‘So we’re going to have to be like any other plant in the country and print our bills [of lading] the night before.’ That didn’t go over real well with the person who has to do it,” Wintz says. But Wintz predicts that once CEOs and CFOs of customer companies get Dedicated’s reports of savings, they’ll adjust their systems.

A View From the Road

In 1990, a photographer acquaintance suggested to Wintz that he try polarizing-filter lenses for his eye problems. This became the basis of Wintz’s first pair of customized sunglasses. The outside looked like a normal mirrored lens, but inside that lens sat a polarizing filter that he could adjust for light. “They made my life completely different,” Wintz says. “I was no longer legally blind.”

Wintz had a Denver-based company develop his latest pair of sunglasses three years ago. These combine red and orange filtering lenses that make his rod cells function more like cone cells, enabling him to better discern different colors from shades of gray. “I don’t know that they actually let me see the color, but it’s such a different look,” Wintz says. “For a green road sign, the green [appears] really dark and the letters [appear] really much brighter. It’s like someone gave me a pair of decoder glasses, and I’m suddenly able to see the world the way everyone else described it.”

In 2002, Wintz reached another personal goal he’d long thought impossible: a driver’s license. True, it’s a provisional license, which limits his driving to surface streets at no more than 45 miles per hour. But getting it showed, once again, Wintz’s ability to overcome obstacles via his distinctive insight.

He had originally petitioned for a moped license but couldn’t pass the vision test. The supervisor was on the verge of turning him down, but Wintz persuaded her to at least think about finding a way to test him. Three weeks later, as she drove and Wintz told her what he saw, she offered him the chance to test for his driver’s license. The tester said Wintz saw moving objects better than most people with 20/80 vision, the cutoff for a driver’s license. But she was most impressed with the defensive driving skills he’d learned from riding a bicycle. When he wasn’t sure whether an upcoming traffic light was red or green, Wintz would slow down and pay attention to the traffic around and ahead of him for cues.

“She said, ‘It’s because of your imperfection—you’re compensating by doing other things. That is actually making you a better driver,’” Wintz recalls. “If you think about it, there’s generally a way to do anything. It’s just that most of us are not challenged to do things in different ways.”