Imagine that you’re hauling ice cream over 1,300 miles with multiple, time-sensitive drops. This is your first job for a new customer. To make it even more challenging, the entire haul takes place over a weekend, when both your company and the shipper have only a skeleton crew available to track the shipment. That high-pressure scenario quickly ...

Cargo theft costs between $15 and $30 billion per year in the U.S., and it is increasing. The most popular targets include electronic goods, especially cell phones, but pharmaceuticals and food products are also attractive to thieves. Cargo theft and associated losses have risen by as much as 50% across many load types in the first half of 2009, ...

For the first few years of operation, each of the two dispatchers at Joe Tex Xpress called 25 drivers every morning to locate the fleet’s 50 trucks. Even when every driver answered his cell phone immediately, the check calls would take more than an hour for each dispatcher. “A driver might be on the road or in a situation where he couldn’t ...

Just as company trucks approached the mountainous pick-up point for their dedicated haul, High Country Transportation’s drivers typically lost their cell phone service. With no way to reach his drivers at the freight loading area or along parts of the route, Shawn Crowley, High Country’s operations manager, started looking for a satellite-based ...

''Companies that don't use satellites to track trailers? If they have more than 50 trailers, they're probably not competitive any more,'' warned Kevin Slaughter, vice president of Operations for James Brown Trucking in Lithonia, Georgia. ''If you're running 100 trailers you'd better be tracking them...probably six are not producing. Of those ...