Keith Titus Finds TMW a Fit

Keith Titus is one of three divisions of The Page Companies, and they plan to keep expanding. They recently acquired another, totally independent company in Pennsylvania to bring their total units to more than 200 (mostly dump, some liquid bulk). They now have terminals in New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and employ 100 people plus the 175 owner/operators who work for them. The Challenge The Page Companies, parent company of Keith Titus (headquartered in Weedsport, NY), was operating their 175-unit trucking company with a dispatch system on the AS/400 but wanted a Windows system that was Year 2000 compliant.

They began a search in 1996. “We really wanted something more user friendly,” said Dan McKinnon, CIO at Keith Titus. “We wanted ordinary people to be able to make changes.” Their consultant was from out-of-town and charged aggressively for his trips to modify the system. “We had to pay him to come up with a report every year to edit what he had done the previous year.”

Keith Titus started off looking at many different dispatch operations systems. They finally made their selection and got it installed, but the vendor went bankrupt before they had gone live. By mid-summer of 1997, they resumed the search.

They eventually narrowed it down to three. They saw the TMW DOS software product and were impressed but were looking strictly for Windows applications. “At that time TMW had no sales people equipped to demonstrate their new TMWSuite software, so they sent one of their chief developers to show it to us,” said Dan. “Once we saw Visual Dispatch, that was it. We knew we’d found what we were looking for. The Dispatch Board worked exactly the way we did business” And they were pleased that TMW had been in business a long time and was well established in the trucking industry.

With direct connections to user-friendly Microsoft Access, the TMWSuite system lets the IT staff members at Keith Titus create their own reports. “Now I can generate my own 1099s,” says Dan. “And I can create other reports just the way I want them—by loads for customers with this heading, that row here, the columns in this order. It was a relief not to have to weigh the decision every time—whether getting information the way I needed it was worth paying the exorbitant consultant fees.”

Keith Titus is making sure they stay on the cutting edge with technology. “We are looking to the future,” said Dan. “We’re using Citrix to connect our Ohio and New Jersey locations so that we have no long distance charges. The connection is through cable and is very high speed.” They believe that delivering superior customer service depends on their being able to access and share information as fast as possible. Their cable company provides Internet access that is 100 times faster than a modem and ten times faster than a T1.

By using Citrix in the outlying terminals, they are able to see all available orders in the system. Before TMW and Citrix, they would call each terminal until they found a match for a truck. Now they use TMW's dispatch views to look at each other's boards, and know what loads are available in ALL outlying terminals - current to the minute!

“The results we’re getting are exceptional,” said Dan. With the TMWSuite reports they can analyze profitability line item by line item and tell exactly where they are making money and where they need to charge more. “We don’t waste six months before we find out something isn’t profitable,” he said. “And with the history our dispatchers have right in front of them, they don’t have to make phone calls and rummage through files to find rates on something a customer ordered previously.”

Besides that,” said Dan, “our customers can no longer call multiple terminals to see if they can get a better rate! We all know the right rate. And our owner/operators are absolutely thrilled because our settlement sheets give them a complete breakdown by item so they know exactly how much money they’re making. They love it.”