The Old Man's career dries up, Snackbar transfers to Crete from Shaffer

It's not just the battery charge, it's the upload schedule. Schneider's first trailer tracking vendor only wanted the trailer to communicate when the pigtail was plugged in or unplugged. Schneider wanted at least 4 updates per day. After a couple of years of back and forth, Schneider changed vendors and PRESTO, trailer tracking became better. It still had it's flaws - the antenna gets damaged, the tracking unit gets unplugged by the bumps on I-70 in Indiana, etc, but 90% of the time when I typed in a trailer number, it pinged the precise location. The other 10% of the time it showed an idle so long that I knew the trailer probably wasn't there, or if it was it was TBO. The price tag to get that kind of visibility was enormous, but worth it in my opinion.

 

This one isn't totally on the carrier. Even if they spring for top of the line trailer tracking equipment and software there are going to be technology failures, but that's not the weak point of the system.

Planner sees a customer has 6 empty trailers and no inbound drivers scheduled until after SSB would get there, so the planner sends SSB. However 1 of those is still loaded, and between getting assigned an arrival, a second gets put in a door to live load, the third is grabbed by a driver who got up early but didn't resend his eta, the fourth by a driver 'ramboing' his empty trailer search, the 5th left three days ago but the driver typed in the wrong trailer number sending errors cascading through the system which distracts the planners from getting real work done, and while the 6th is showing at the customer - it's actually across the street.

I always told my trainees that I would rather clean the bathrooms at Comiskey Park after a double header on 50 cent beer and taco night than be a box planner. Being a box planner is like playing chess in a room lit by strobe lights against an opponent that cheats while getting randomly slapped upside the head. They're trying to make plans based of off inaccurate or outdated information, without visibility of a significant number of salient factors.

 

You had far better luck with Schneider’s tracking than I did. By the time I left last June, that 90% was a pipe dream, at least in my eyes.

 

I left a year before that. At that point the trailer tracking pretty darn accurate.

 

Some may be red tagged for service.

 

If the carrier isn't cheap with their trailer tracking the good units can ping the interior to determine if the trailer is in fact loaded or empty, have solar charging for virtually unlimited service while untethered and accuracy down to +/- 10 feet.

Now, I do agree that bad data into the other company systems causes a lot of problems but trailer tracking is an easy to solve for problem with the right system. Back when I sold ELDs the vendor I marketed already had these solutions and they have greatly improved since 2017 when I was actively selling them thru my consulting company.

 

By the way anyone know how to access the profit sharing account?? I know it's through the UBT bank but I never set up an account....would that be HR to walk me through it??

 

I think you can get a hold of either benefits dept or union bank themselves if I’m not mistaken to fix that issue.

 

What kind of home time do you take? That’s #### good money.

 

I generally take roughly around 60 days a year off…