Seamless Growth
"We scaled from 80 trucks to 240 trucks almost overnight," said Cory Staheli, Vice President of Information Systems for Knight Transportation. "And we did it without adding any head count to our IT department."
Knight Transportation, listed as one of Transport-Topics' 100 Top For-Hire Carriers in 2009 and included on Forbes Magazine's 200 Best Small Companies for 11 years running, began its association with Innovative software in the early 1990s. As a customer of the on-premise Innovative IES for IBM iTM (AS/400), Knight grew from 200 trucks in its infancy to nearly 4,000 trucks today.
In July 2004, Knight started its refrigerated business with five trucks and organically grew to 80 trucks over the first 13 months of operation.
Scalable Success
"We started a new refrigerated business and without paying an extra penny (in IT dollars), without having to add any extra servers or IT head count, we were able to open a separate company, utilizing the IES system, " Staheli said. "We chose to have a separate environment for our refrigerated business, because we didn't want to mix refrigerated and transportation within the same library. So we just created a new library and started production."
Then, in August 2005, the new business jumped to 240 trucks when Knight purchased Edward Bros, Inc., a 48-year-old refrigerated truckload carrier based in Idaho Falls, Idaho and also an IES user. By the end of October, Edward Bros.'s data was totally merged, uncorrupted, into Knight's IES system.
"Edward Bros. was on the IES R8 version, and so immediately we had to upgrade to R8," Staheli said. "That was mid-August. We did a very fast upgrade - it took about six weeks with a lot of help from Innovative. The folks at Innovative really came through for us. They did whatever needed to be done to make sure it happened. By October 15, we had converted to R8. Two weeks later, we merged all of Edward Bros.'s data and didn't skip a beat... All the IT functions that resided in Idaho were brought down to Phoenix, without adding any head count to our IT department."
Bringing It All Together
Acquiring another Innovative shop also eliminated the need to re-enter data, thereby maintaining the integrity of the records and lowering costs in the process.
"Edward Bros. had been in business for 48 years," Staheli said. "To try to re-key all of that data... even if I didn't manually key it, to try to take it from one format, convert it to another format, and push it in would have cost eight or nine times more than what we put into it."
Knight's experience reflects how effectively Innovative IES facilitates carrier growth and demonstrates the overall scalability of the IES system.
"Innovative certainly works anywhere you are at, regardless of where you are in your growth cycle. It will help you today, and it's going to grow with you," Staheli added. "I think that's an important consideration, especially just how easy it is to open a new line of business. Innovative is a robust, scaleable system that facilitates growth and allows you to be flexible in how you achieve your goals. It allows you to do that without having to add overhead in terms of IT infrastructure or your IT budget with people.
"It's a pretty phenomenal story."
