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Landair Transport Success Story

Landair's dependability, unequaled customer service, and dedicated employees have been the key factors behind the company's exceptional growth. From its origin as a start up truck line in Greeneville, TN in 1981, to its present position as a national total transportation and logistics resource, Landair has focused on giving customers the service they need and dependability they can count on.

Today, Landair's services include general commodities truckload service, dedicated contract services, commercial & contract warehousing, store / stockroom management, transportation management and much more.

Landair has the resources to get the job done with a fleet of 850 power units, 2100 trailers, 3.4 million square feet of warehousing and distribution space, coupled with advanced tracking, tracing and real time communications.

Landair takes great pride in the use of technology as an extension of their business. They use state of the art communications and computerized tracking systems to pinpoint the exact location, speed and direction of travel for any Landair vehicle within seconds. Landair's business philosophy leverages technology as their advantage over competitors. As a result of this philosophy, they focus on IT assets to maximize business productivity.

Technology Investments

Landair has invested in technology from leading vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel, Netscreen and Red Hat. Through the use of these technologies, strong integration partners and global communications networks they provide their internal clients with the best network possible. As they evolved their network they made a business decision to look for logical means of extending the IT infrastructure. The goals were to allow customers to take advantage of their capabilities and assets as well as those of their trusted partners.

PaperWise was a natural choice

Because of their philosophy of partnering with the strongest technology, Landair chose PaperWise. "We were looking for a partner willing to work with us to integrate their document management system" says Chris Dolese, Director of Information Technologies. "Many of the other systems offered basic functionality, but only PaperWise truly integrated with our business processes and even offered the entire solution as a hosted service."

Why ASP?

While Landair is a huge advocate of technology, they were not interested in the day to day issues and expenses of supporting extensive hardware. They have decided it is much more efficient to focus on their core business strategies rather than managing IT infrastructure. At this time, Landair out sources ALL of their business technologies.

Why Innovative

Innovative automates business methods for trucking companies using the latest technology with software that provides real-time information that is accessible, meaningful and easy to manage. Through streamlined and intuitive processes, this software helps improve decision-making and planning, reduces costs and improves customer service. Unlike many competitors, Innovative offered an ASP model, eliminating onsite hardware requirements and IT Support.

The problem

Landair recognized the inefficiency of trying to manage the massive amount of paper their business generated every day. They had full time staff sorting and collating hundreds of invoices and copies of supporting documentation each day. In addition, Landair needed the ability to collect driver documents from multiple sources including Transflo truck-stop scanning, fax, traditional high-rate production scanners and Multifunction devices at their remote sites.

The solution

PaperWise delivered a robust, end to end solution that addressed all of Landair's stringent requirements. Drivers encode their trip cover sheets with fill-in bubbles much like scholastic tests. The documents are scanned and digitized at one of hundreds of Transflo's truck stop scan stations located across the country.

The documents are immediately sent via the Transflo network to PaperWise. The system processes each cover sheet by "reading" bubbles to extract a valid PRO and tractor number for each trip. Other bar-codes are read to determine document types. This information is gathered and used to query the Innovative Systems AS/400 database and retrieve all additional information required for processing the images such as customer code, driver code, billing name and status information.

This process has been written to trap and resolve many common errors and omissions automatically. An example would be automatically separating large scan batches into individual document packs.

Images are then routed through the workflow process. Depending on specific values, documents follow assigned routes through the PaperWise workflow system. The documents travel through all processing and audit points the same as the paper copies were previously routed with one exception - they are processed in a fraction of the time.

The trip images are then routed to the payroll department for entry into the Innovative payroll or settlement system and marked as complete. PaperWise launches the rendition billing process using the DataWise module. The Innovative System generates invoice text files which PaperWise automatically imports, formats, overlays, retrieves supporting documents, collates and prints. The resulting billing run outputs a ready-to-mail sequence of customer invoices along with copies of all required documents.

How things are today

PaperWise has transformed the paper-based process to a totally automated transmittal, routing, filing and retrieval system. The required documents are received and processed by the PaperWise system within minutes of being scanned. The entire process which generates customer invoices is completed within one hour. There is no opportunity for paper loss, misrouting or misfiling. These invoices and images are easily accessible within seconds from anywhere within the organization for the designated life of the document.

All of the data and equipment resides at PaperWise's Network Operations Center. This highly secure and environmentally hardened state-of-the-art facility is located 85 ft below ground and is fully self-contained. All utilities and network services are triple redundant and maintained on site to provide the utmost reliability for business continuance in the event of a local disaster.

What does the future hold?

In the immediate future PaperWise will be handing all of the check printing functions including workflow, printing MICR encoded routing information, signature logic, and automatic archival of digital checks.

On the horizon, the Accounts Payable and Human Resources departments will be brought on-line. Beyond that says Chris Dolese "any piece of paper that is currently stored in a banker's box or file cabinet will be scanned into the PaperWise system." "I'm tired of people wasting their precious time digging around looking for lost documents."