Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/815349
56 commercial carrier journal | april 2017 H onesty. Integrity. Character. Excellence. Benevolence." Those five words scrolled above the reception desk greet every visitor that enters Nussbaum Transportation's headquarters in Normal, Ill. It's easy to look past them, as they are boilerplate material in most company mission statements. But if you stick around long enough, it's soon clear that Nussbaum isn't just paying lip service to these five values – they are rooted firmly in the company's culture. That environment has helped gener- ate a host of innovations, including two that earned Nussbaum recognitions as a CCJ Innovator, first in 2012 for its role in developing a heavy-duty dual- purpose dry van trailer, and again in 2016 for leveraging event recorder and engine control module data to measure driver behavior and retool its fuel score- card program. The latter has earned Nussbaum Transportation CCJ's 2017 Innovator of the Year award. MIGRATING FROM MPGS Fuel incentive programs are noth- ing new to trucking. When diesel prices eclipsed $4 a few years ago, they became commonplace. Nussbaum's first dive into driver bonuses tied to mpg results began in 2009 with its Driver Excelerator performance-based pay program, a four-pronged scorecard system that included a fuel component that measured readily trackable metrics for fuel economy, idle time, fuel pur- chasing compliance, on-time deliveries and out-of-route mileage. Excelerator bonuses are awarded on a per-mile basis, with an average of 3 cents per mile added to a driver's base mileage pay. Top-performing drivers earn as much as an additional 6 cents per mile over base. Nussbaum uses the Excelerator program to place drivers into three categories – gold, silver and bronze. For the most part, the fuel scorecard was a success. Nussbaum now has one of the leading fuel economy averages in the truckload segment – 8.5 mpg for its fleet of 300 trucks. Over the next several years, Nuss- baum's IT department, along with Jeremy Stickling, director of human resources and safety, revamped the Excelerator program's fuel scorecard to eliminate complaints about fairness based on route attributes. "The question at the time was 'How do we take the subjectivity out of this – the circumstances and situations that drive fuel economy up and down?' " says Stickling. The company went to frustrating lengths to normalize results based on external factors such as load weight, truck age and model, trailer type and weather. "We were looking at variables like wind speed in Nebraska and driving through the mountains," says Brent Nussbaum, chief executive officer. "You wouldn't believe the amount of data we poured through the IT department to put together the right score." The changes helped level the play- ing field but ultimately didn't eliminate all external variability and load/route subjectivity, and management contin- ued to field questions and complaints Truckload carrier affects safety, fuel performance with driver behavior program B Y J E F F C R I S S E Y