CHEETAH LOGISTICS HELPS SMALL, FAMILY-OWNED LTL TRANSFORM 'BARELY CONTROLLED CHAOS' INTO GREATER CUSTOMER SATISFACTION; MARGINS

Westlake Village, CA (January 24, 2005) — When regional LTL carrier Circle Delivery saw missed pick-ups on the rise at their Chicago terminal, CEO Greg Brown knew something had to be done quickly.

“We may be a small family-owned company, but we've always strived to provide our customers with the finest service available in our industry," Brown said. "The challenge has always been how to do that while remaining profitable.”

The Chicago terminal, Circle Delivery's largest, presented the company with unique challenges not present with their other terminals. With 25 trucks, a very large service area and constant traffic and weather-related problems, Circle Delivery's Chicago dispatcher struggled to keep his drivers efficient and his customers informed.

“The dispatch office was a scene of barely controlled chaos," said Jack Lakinger, manager of the Chicago terminal. "The phones were ringing non-stop, and our old two-way radio system for getting pick-up and delivery information to and from our drivers just added to the din.”

According to Lakinger, the radio system had definite drawbacks, including areas of spotty to non-existent coverage, leaving him blind as to his fleet's disposition for periods of time. The lack of timely information created problems for his customer service reps with customers seeking information that just wasn't always available.

“I've worked very hard to keep our business on the leading edge of technology," Brown said. "I could see that we had to do something to increase the efficiency of the Chicago terminal, and more trucks was not a viable answer.”

For Brown, the answer was clearly to replace the old manual dispatch and delivery system with new technology that would afford them the same supply chain visibility into their fleet's activities as used by larger carriers.

Not surprisingly, he quickly found that the problem in seeking out integrated solutions that rival those of FedEx, UPS and other major transport companies is the sizeable investment that can make a near term ROI difficult, at best. He examined a number of integrated solutions, including UPS Logistics. "We'd have had to mortgage the farm to buy that one," Brown noted.

Finally, Brown discovered Cheetah Freight, from Cheetah Software Systems.

“Cheetah allowed us to get all the same benefits as other packages we looked at, but for a fraction of the cost,” Brown said. “With Cheetah's SaaS model, we were able to offer our customers the same services they would get from much larger companies, without having to purchase a lot of new hardware or adding IT staff.”

With Cheetah's truck routing and dispatch software solution, Lakinger says that CSR call volume has decreased dramatically, and the radio chatter has disappeared. "The Cheetah system has allowed us to get much more work done in a much less stressful environment,” Lakinger says.

Lakinger also noted that their end-of-day line haul planning is getting done two to three hours earlier. "We no longer have to wait for all the trucks to come in to get our planning done," he said. "Cheetah lets us know what each truck has on board, the number of pieces or skids, their weights and destination zips, before they hit the terminal.”

Brown also reports that because a lot of the information needed to create bills is input by their drivers throughout the course of the day, it can reduce the amount of data input his biller has to make by at least 150 keystrokes per bill.

“At first I was skeptical about the Cheetah implementation," says Lakinger, "but now, just a few months in, I wonder how we ever did without it.”

About Cheetah Software Systems:
Founded in 1987, Cheetah specializes in helping fleets significantly increase their margins by providing the only logistics system available today that is able to simultaneously offer real-time route optimization, delivery and dispatch, delivery and pickup information to dispatchers, drivers, customer service reps (CSR's), shippers and customers. Cheetah’s completely unique and effective software and hardware system gives companies with small and mid-sized fleets real-time logistic technology rivaling those used by FedEx® and UPS® for a small fraction of the cost. For more information, please call 805-373-7111.

About Circle Delivery, Inc.:
Founded in 1980, Nashville, TN-based Circle Delivery provides, from Chicago and Milwaukee, next day delivery into Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga Tennessee and second day delivery into the rest of Tennessee as well as second day and third day delivery to points Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. For more information, please call 800-251-1834 or visit the website at www.circledelivery.com.