The practices have helped make Con-Way the perennial earnings leader in its niche of less-than-full-truckload, time- and day-definite freight delivery. So the company made the risky decision to dedicate on-staff industrial engineer (and former Chinese Army rocket scientist) YaFeng Du to develop Con-Way's own expert system, starting with its biggest and most complex group, Central Express.

"I figured it would take me six months, but I told them it would be a year in order to make more room," Du says with a sly grin. It ultimately took five years and $3 million to develop, test and deploy at Con-Way Central in late 2000. The delay came from the excruciating challenge of extracting the business rules and logic from the minds of the dispatchers, coding them into the expert system, and getting it to work. Tests produced routes that were far from optimized - a truck would be sent out of its way, or a driver would be stranded too far from home to get back during his shift. The interrelationships of all the variables were so complex that a fix to one flaw would cause two new problems. Because faulty system output would often take as long as month to surface during testing, each change necessitated a stressful, fingers-crossed waiting period.

User Struggles

It's been two years since Con-Way deployed its system at Central Express. But Du, a fidgety man with a ready smile, still seems anxious to get back to his computer to work on changes for further implementations. Du says his biggest development mistake was that after talking to just one dispatcher, he rushed a rudimentary system into place after three months as a proof of concept. "I should have spent more time with the dispatchers and should have done some dispatching myself," says Du, now director of decision technology. After the letdown of the demo, Du struggled to accommodate the various styles and problem-solving preferences of all the dispatchers. They peppered him to add so many rules that the system and its developer were overwhelmed. "We had thousands of rules after a while," says Du. "It was very frustrating, and I came close to giving up, thinking we'd never get it to work." Lines of C++ code mushroomed to 250,000 (100,000 lines are now active). In the end, Du's boss, Stotlar, who looks too young at 41 to be COO of a $2 billion company, told the dispatchers enough is enough. "I had to lean on them a bit; they were throwing everything in but the kitchen sink," Stotlar recalls.

But Du's time spent with the dispatchers was not wasted. This group could easily have felt threatened by the project and sabotaged it. Instead, their sweat spent to help build the new system bought equity in it. "This had to be acceptable to the guys here. All you'll get is alienation if you stuff something down someone's throat," says Michael Kucinski, who took over as director of line-haul and freight flow at Con-Way Central when Labrie was promoted to run Con-Way Western. Kucinski acted as a rudder "to keep attitudes straight" and remind his dispatchers that "there was a light at the end of the tunnel." And with time, Kucinski says, they really learned how much they appreciated line-haul automation after computer crashes forced them to go back to manual routing on three occasions.

"It saves us a lot of time each night, which we use to make sure we've got accurate order information, look into problems and handle changes," says Robinson, who helped test the system and is now line-haul supervisor at Con-Way Central. The system captures customers' shipment pickup requests throughout the day, including orders coming as late as 5:15 p.m. It flags suspect data for the dispatchers to verify or correct, such as freight dimensions and weight specs that don't seem to correlate. It then works its optimization magic, taking just seven minutes to generate a routing plan for 95 percent of the day's overnight shipments. Dispatchers, now trained as analysts on a managerial track, massage the plan via a Web interface, solving any remaining driver shortages and tweaking routes for exceptional circumstances.