In House Dispatching
With Line Drive

After countless years of relying on outside vendors to provide our linehaul dispatch programs utilized by our Line Drivers, our IT team has successfully created a homegrown application: Line Drive. By having our own in-house dispatching program, we can customize the program to our needs while minimizing the steps needed to complete simple dispatch functions. All in all, this helps reduce the time that the Drivers are on the handheld which gets them headed to their next destination much soon than our previous handheld dispatch programs. Being self-sufficient helps immensely in the event a problem arises, as we can begin resolving the issue within minutes instead of hours or even days which was the case when at the mercy of an outside vendors proprietary program.

The development for Line Drive started in 2023 with initial Driver testing starting in early 2024 with John Brinkman, AUB Line Driver. Additional testing was done over 8 months with Line Drivers, Tyler Horn-AUB, Mark Carlson-BOI, and Kurt Kytta-OLY. They helped provide feedback to the Programmers to assist in improving the Driver experience and efficiency of Line Drive. The Drivers were also able to help pinpoint where issues existed under different scenarios and, with development being in house, upgrades were completed by the following day in many instances. Toward the end of 2024, we began rolling out Line Drive company-wide in stages which allowed us to monitor how the constant growth would affect the programs functionality. 50, 100, 200, and finally nearly 300 Drivers were using the program simultaneously. While there were some growing pains along the way, regardless of the time of day, IT was able to correct the issues quickly to ensure there were minimal interruptions to operations.

While the Drivers have their new toy to play with, so does Central Dispatch. Working in consort with the Line Drive app, IT also developed the Line Drive website that works side-by-side with our existing AS/400 platform. The Line Drive website gives us the ability to continue dispatching in times that AS/400 may be out or down for maintenance, along with a few other specialty features to make our jobs easier. As we move forward, we will continue to work on integrating more features that will continue to improve the Drivers experience/efficiency on the Line Drive app.

I want to give a huge thanks to Scott Thompson, Dkyn Fehr, Phil Stott, Miles Davies, and Robert Rosales along with everyone else behind the scenes while seeing this major undertaking through.