Benjamin Cook (bottom right), president of Hoosier Tradewinds, and Matthew Deck (top), executive vice president, recruited a high-caliber chief information officer, Ben Becker, to design a system that enables management to proactively solve driver problems.
In 2003, the top executives of Carmel, Ind.-based Hoosier Tradewinds recognized the need to improve the company’s information systems. They discovered that managers throughout the company – dispatchers, planners and executives – needed more information more quickly in order to make proactive decisions.
Nowhere was this need more apparent than in the area of recruitment and retention of owner-operators, which provide all of Hoosier Tradewinds’ power units.
“As you often find, you don’t know that a guy is unhappy until it’s too late,” says Executive Vice President Matthew Deck. “If someone said they are quitting, then we dealt with it.”
To proactively solve driver problems, management wanted to see key metrics on drivers weekly and even daily, including revenue, profitability, home time and verbal complaints.
But while President Benjamin Cook and Deck agreed that Hoosier Tradewinds needed better information management, no one working at the 88-truck operation had the knowledge and expertise to implement or manage those solutions.
So in late 2003, Cook and Deck began looking for a high-caliber chief information officer. As it happened, the timing was excellent. Ben Becker was looking for an alternative to the intense travel and hectic lifestyle of consulting work. For seven years, Becker had worked as a data warehouse consultant, designing systems for corporations to access and analyze information at various levels.
