A Job Only Bogie Could Handle
By Advance Business Capital 
Second in a 3-part series: Will the Dispatcher of the Future Be a Robot?

There’s a memorable exchange in They Drive By Night, the gritty 1940 movie about a pair of brothers (George Raft and Humphrey Bogart) making a go of it with their small trucking company. Bogart, in a supporting role, plays a trucker who’s lost an arm in a wreck and can no longer drive. Sunk into self-pity and bitterness, he’s jolted back to life by big brother Raft, who tells him they desperately need a reliable dispatcher.

BOGART: Me? Dispatcher? You’re jokin’!
RAFT: We need a man who knows what truckers go through.
BOGART: You askin’ me to drive a desk from now on?
RAFT: No, not unless you’re big enough to do the job!

Bogie reluctantly takes the position and before long his empathy with fellow drivers has driven them to greater productivity and turned the company’s fortunes around (along with his self-esteem). This is probably the most idealized portrait of a dispatcher in cinema. As a role model it certainly beats Danny De Vito’s sadistic shrimp in the cab cage of Taxi.

Where the Exception Is the Rule 
But in larger companies, much of the dispatcher’s job—planning and scheduling loads—has been assumed by load matching software, which sorts through load and route variables in a fraction of the time it would take even the most experienced dispatcher. 

At present however, computers are a long way from replacing the full scope of a dispatcher’s job. A computer depends on full information to make intelligent decisions and inevitably information is incomplete. Trucking involves innumerable “exceptions,” in the words of Tom McLeod of McLeod Software, which is the country’s second-largest provider of off-the-shelf dispatch software.

Has there ever been a long-haul delivery that didn’t involve “exceptions?” Weather, accidents, emergency road closures, breakdowns, driver illness or fatigue: the list of exceptions is endless. Almost all large to medium trucking companies now use dispatch software, but even those that rely on it most still adjust or change the software’s assignments 50% of the time.

Still, while dispatch software isn’t remotely close to replacing dispatchers, it has greatly increased dispatcher productivity. In the old days, a dispatcher could monitor at most 25 trucks. These days it’s possible to manage anywhere from 40 to 80.

Schneider: Modeling the Pit 
In 2008 Schneider National, one of the country’s largest carriers, completed a collaboration with Princeton University to see just how much of a dispatcher’s job could be computer controlled. A task force of fleet managers, transportation specialists and programmers worked for two years to create a program that successfully modeled the behavior of a group of experienced programmers.

Schneider employs hundreds of dispatchers. Its dispatcher “pit” is the size of an auditorium, a grid of dozens of cubicle rows so labyrinthine that some dispatchers float helium balloons from their cubicles to guide them back from breaks.

Schneider’s program, dubbed TPS (for Tactical Planning Simulator) is useful for modeling large scale shifts in routes and schedules, helping the company and its customers make major decisions, but so far Schneider has made no attempt to replace its pit people with computers. At present, the full list of a dispatcher duties are more than any machine can handle. In our final installment, we’ll examine just what those are.

This story was drawn from articles in FleetOwner and Transport Topics.
www.advancebcap.com