Veriha Trucking is a family-owned business, established by John Veriha in 1978. Now owned and operated by his daughter Karen Smercheck, Veriha Trucking is thriving as a woman owned trucking enterprise. Headquartered in Wisconsin, the 250+ fleet provides transportation solutions across 48 states and Canada.
Data is at the core of Veriha Trucking’s operations, championed by President Karen Smercheck and CFO Alexis Burns vision to create a data-centric company. Veriha have ambitious growth plans and they recognize that a robust data strategy is fundamental to achieve that success. Their personal commitment to prioritizing data-driven decisions over gut instincts sets a compelling example throughout the organization.
“I have a strong background and belief in the power of data to drive performance. Finding a partner like FleetOps that are not only experts in technology but also have a deep-rooted understanding of trucking has really helped us accelerate data adoption across the organisation”
Karen Smerchek, President, Veriha Trucking
Before joining forces with FleetOps, Veriha encountered substantial difficulties presenting actionable data to its operations team and front-line teams using their TMS.
Veriha contemplated building its own data warehouse and using a system like Tableau or Power BI to address these issues. However, the idea of building an in-house data system was perceived as an immense undertaking, considering the substantial resources, outsourcing needs and ongoing maintenance required.
Veriha and FleetOps Partnership
In the initial phases of exploring this ambitious venture, Alexis heard of FleetOps from other carriers. What caught her attention was the fact that FleetOps was built exclusively for the trucking industry and its deep understanding of trucking operations and systems they already use such as their TMS.
Veriha formally partnered with FleetOps in April 2022. The integration process was swift, impressing Alexis with the rapid connection to their TMS and ELD systems and the speed at which they saw accurate metrics and dashboards appear in the platform.
“Understanding McLeod’s complex data structure and how various tables interconnect is extremely challenging. FleetOps’ knowledge of our underlying systems coupled with their ability to quickly understand our operations ensured we saw value almost immediately,” remarked Alexis.
FleetOps quickly customised the platform to mirror Veriha’s operation, so that they were providing frontline staff with actionable data in a matter of weeks.
Veriha’s leadership team is actively engaged with the platform, gaining increased visibility into overall business performance.
A comprehensive Executive Meeting Space tailored for the leadership team consolidates customer, carrier, and driver success metrics, highlighting exceptions in each area where targets are not being met. This tool is regularly utilized in leadership meetings, allowing them to evaluate company performance in each area.
The ability to drill down into the data is immensely advantageous for Veriha, facilitating the ability to root cause performance issues. Alexis emphasizes, “We can’t improve if we can’t identify and understand the reasons behind poor performance. FleetOps allows us to identify the underperforming resources and people in our business and through reason codes, we can understand why they are underperforming. FleetOps gives better visibility to the entire leadership team and enhanced accountability across the board.”
The introduction of personalized fleet manager dashboards led to the roll out of FleetOps among frontline staff.
“When we introduced FleetOps to our fleet managers, we observed a fundamental shift in their mindset,” highlighted Valeriy Melnyk, a Transport Analyst at Veriha. “Previously, fleet managers relied on data intelligence platforms primarily for retrospective data analysis from the previous week. However, FleetOps revolutionized our approach to data intelligence allowing frontline staff to be more proactive. Now, they leverage its power not only for historic analysis to provide driver coaching but using the real time targets they can make proactive changes aimed at improving performance and optimizing operational efficiency.”
Managing the Exceptions
Running a high-performance operation is a continuous journey of identifying and addressing outliers that consistently impact your bottom line. Identifying outliers using simple metrics like total miles per driver or pay can often generate too much noise to be effectively actionable. This is where FleetOps came into the picture when Veriha sought a partner to help them pinpoint poorly utilized drivers.
Veriha had previously struggled to provide quick and easy visibility in a platform that users were consistently engaged in to monitor wage expense compared to revenue. FleetOps facilitated a new driver watchlist based on driver pay versus revenue generated for individual drivers on a 13-week rolling average was created. This watchlist quickly highlights drivers falling below thresholds. Furthermore, it captures reason codes from frontline staff for drivers who are underperforming, including instances like ‘excessive home time’ or “poor trip planning” from either the driver or the planner. This equips fleet managers and executives with the tools to pinpoint the root causes of performance problems, facilitating more effective action planning. Each week, fleet managers meet to brainstorm and move drivers off the watchlist, transitioning many from underperformers to high performers.
Managing Lane Volumes
Veriha, like many fleets, faced difficulties in finding a platform to effectively manage and track customer commitments. Like most fleets, their awards lay in spreadsheets in shared folders on a network drive making it difficult for staff to track under and over-performing lanes.
FleetOps’ Customer Awards Tracker addressed this by allowing Veriha to upload all commitments into a single platform, which then monitors those awards against actual orders in real-time. This empowers Veriha to oversee customer lane performance by identifying exceptions, enabling them to easily spot customers falling short or exceeding their commitments and initiate necessary discussions based on this data.
Veriha’s partnership with FleetOps has been instrumental in navigating the challenging market conditions of the past 18 months.
By leveraging FleetOps’ powerful analytics and expert guidance, Veriha has achieved significant improvements in driver performance, accountability, visibility and made significant strides towards a more efficient, proactive operations environment.
As Alexis stated “FleetOps has become an indispensable tool for our team. With such challenging market conditions, it’s easy to get blindsided unless you’re continuously monitoring performance trends and working as a team to address wins and losses. The FleetOps platform allowed us to adapt to these changing market dynamics and make informed decisions”.
“FleetOps is one of my favourite vendors to work with and I have pretty high standards. It’s more of a partnership then a typical vendor relationship, where their success is tied to our success.”
Alexis Burns, Veriha Trucking
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