Transportation company reduces
costs and satisfies customers
Customer profile
Daylight Transport reduces customer service costs by one FTE and saves up to $1,000
a day in revenue while improving customer satisfaction using Dell Boomi AtomSphere
Company
Industry Country Employees
Website Daylight Transport
Transportation
United States
400
www.dylt.com
Business need
To deliver better customer service and
reduce customer service workload,
Daylight Transport needed to better
integrate its systems, including freight
pick-up, tracking and invoicing.
Solution
Daylight Transport used Dell Boomi
AtomSphere to quickly integrate
its systems, reducing the customer
workload by one full-time employee
and enabling easy integration of one
tool that helps generate an additional
$800–$1,000 a day in revenues.
Benefits
“With Boomi, we were able to implement the
new dimensioner tool quickly...instead of
having to build our own custom integration.
Having that tool integrated into our systems
enables us to generate an additional $1,000 in
revenue per day.”
• Enabled fast integration of systems —
in hours or days instead of weeks
or months
• Reduced customer service workload
by one full-time employee
• Improved customer retention
by enabling fast fulfillment of
enhancement requests
• Enabled easy integration of one tool
that helps generate an additional
$800 to $1,000 a day in revenues
• Minimized business disruptions with a
robust architecture
Solutions at a glance
• Application Integration
John Manzanares,
Vice President of Information Technology and CIO, Daylight Transport
Founded in 1977, Daylight Transport is one of the leading
expedited less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers in the United States.
The company offers air freight, volume and truckload services
nationwide. Named one of the 100 fastest-growing companies
four years in a row by the Los Angeles Business Journal,
Daylight Transport relies heavily on information technology
to deliver fast and flexible services for its customers. A critical
component of that success is Dell Boomi AtomSphere.
Fast, flexible service requires
integrated systems
“Because of Boomi,
our development
time is now often
measured in
minutes rather than
hours or days.”
Martin Zsembik,
Senior Application Developer
Daylight Transport is a non-assetbased company; rather than owning its
own trucks, it has a virtual network of
independent contractors, agents and
carriers that move its freight. Therefore,
the company requires tightly integrated
systems to manage customer orders,
coordinate freight movement, monitor
shipments, notify partners, invoice
clients and more.
One of the core technologies the
company uses is IBM Sterling Gentran,
which provides electronic data
interchange (EDI) and data translation
for high-volume transactions. Equally
important is TruckMate from TMW
Systems, a transportation management
system that functions both as an ERP,
managing freight movement from
pick-up to delivery, and as the financial
system for Daylight Transport, providing
invoicing and other financial services.
Working to keep customers happy
and costs down
However, the system as a whole was
not smoothly integrated, leaving the
company vulnerable to a variety of
issues that affected both internal
operations and customer satisfaction.
“The end-to-end process was a
hodgepodge of various technologies
coupled together, including not only
Gentran and TruckMate but a patchwork
of FTP applications and home-grown
scripts,” explains Martin Zsembik, senior
application developer at Daylight
2
Transport. “That meant we had multiple
points of failure. Moreover, with no
oversight over the whole system, we
could have a failure in one system and
not know about it.”
These failures could have a significant
impact on the business. “Customers
might not be getting invoices or they
may not be getting status messages
on where their freight was,” recalls
John Manzanares, vice president of
information technology and CIO of
Daylight Transport. “Those issues
would cause frustration for them. This
would also result in higher costs for us,
since payments would be delayed or
customer service would receive more
calls requiring them to chase down
information customers should have
been getting electronically.”
Connecting cloud and on-premises
applications without software
or appliances
With customer satisfaction a top
priority, the company knew it needed a
way to better integrate its system and
proactively detect and remediate issues
before they could affect customers and
partners. The company recognized that
building an integration platform in-
Products and Services
Software
Dell Boomi AtomSphere
house was not feasible, since it would
require extensive development resources
and a great deal of time. Moreover,
Zsembik already had experience with a
solution that could deliver everything
Daylight Transport needed right away:
Dell Boomi AtomSphere.
Quick and effective integration
improves customer retention
A quick evaluation of Boomi, coupled
with Zsembik’s previous positive
experience, was enough to convince
Daylight Transport to move quickly into
full implementation mode. The company
found that implementation was much
faster with Boomi than it would have
been otherwise. “We were able to come
up with the proof of concept quite
quickly, and then we immediately started
cranking out new implementations
and migrating implementations from
Gentran,” explains Zsembik. “With Boomi,
we went from weeks of implementation
down to days.”
In particular, the company relies on
Boomi’s reusable components. “Boomi
gives us the ability to copy processes
and to copy pieces within a process,”
notes Zsembik. “Because of Boomi,
our development time is now often
measured in minutes rather than hours
or days.”
In fact, with Boomi, Daylight Transport
has been able to clear out a big backlog
of customer EDI requests that the
company could not fulfil before. “With
our old system, we couldn’t handle
those requests in a timely manner, and
that left us open to those customers
taking their business elsewhere,” says
Manzanares. “Getting their requests
implemented quickly has really
cemented those relationships and help
us hold on to those customers.”
Easy integration of one tool
generates an additional $800 to
$1,000 a day
Daylight Transport has reaped additional
revenue as well — $800 to $1,000 a
3
day in one case. The company had
purchased a dimensioner – a tool which
measures freight. The company used
Boomi to integrate the dimensioner
into its transportation system, tying
dimensioning data to each shipment
and putting that information at the
fingertips of Daylight Transport’s weights
and inspection department. “With
Boomi, we were able to implement the
new dimensioner tool quickly — we
had a prototype working in less than
a day — instead of having to build our
own custom integration,” Manzanares
explains. “Having that tool integrated
into our systems generates an additional
$800 to $1,000 of revenue per day.”
Daylight Transport also used Boomi to
integrate its accounts receivable process.
Information from the check scanning
system is integrated with the financial
systems, end-to-end so the company
can electronically transfer the funds
into its account and users of the check
scanning system know whether the
transactions were successful. “Boomi
enables us to manage the end-to-end
process to make sure that cash flow
happens,” notes Manzanares. “And the
integration took only a day; building our
own customer interfaces to build in that
layer of integration would have taken
weeks of development.”
Integrating systems saves the cost
of a FTE
Another benefit Daylight Transport
has realized is to reduce the customer
service workload by one full-time
employee. Customers can now get data
about their shipments in near real-time,
whether it’s invoicing information or
shipment status information, without
having to make phone calls or send
emails.
For example, Daylight Transport used to
have two full-time resources manually
contacting its long-haul providers
for status information to estimate
when each truck was going to arrive
at a terminal, and these resources
“Now that we’ve
integrated [our
status update]
systems through
Boomi...we’ve
eliminated 40
to 50 percent of
the phone calls
and emails —
effectively a fulltime employee
that we can
redeploy to more
strategic projects.”
John Manzanares,
Vice President of Information
Technology and CIO
weren’t able to get through the entire
list during their workday, Manzanares
explains. “Now that we’ve integrated
those systems through Boomi and we’re
getting status updates electronically,
we’ve eliminated 40 to 50 percent
of those phone calls and emails —
effectively a full-time employee that we
can redeploy to more strategic projects,”
Manzanares says. “And the time savings
is going to grow as we add more carriers
to Boomi. Plus, the information is
more accurate.”
The company has seen similar time
savings by integrating other systems
using Boomi. “On the customer service
side, we’ve done nearly the same thing
with data entry for pick-up requests
for new freight shipments from our
customers,” says Zsembik.
A robust architecture minimizes
business disruptions
Daylight Transport also no longer has to
worry about failures going unnoticed.
“In our old system, if some of the data
coming across didn’t meet certain
criteria, it would just fail without notice,”
explains Manzanares. “With Boomi we
can put in handlers so that if things don’t
work perfectly, it doesn’t shut down.
For example, we can skip an erroneous
record entirely and go on to the next
one. That robustness enables us to
better serve our customers.”
New opportunities for integration
Daylight Transport has also been able
to add functionality that was difficult
or impossible before. “With the old
architecture, we were limited in what we
could do, but with Boomi, we can tailor
the code to generate data as needed,”
explains Zsembik. Given its flexibility, the
Daylight Transport team can write code
any way it needs to through Boomi. As
a result, the team added new EDI sets
that weren’t attempted previously, or
that it had been able to accomplish
using its old EDI translator. “And those
things don’t take hours or days to set up
any more,” Zsembik says. “With Boomi,
it can be an hour or even just minutes,
depending on the type of set we’re
looking to implement. It’s far faster than
anything we’ve had in the past.”
Daylight Transport plans to continue
using Boomi at every opportunity in
the future. “Any time we’re looking to
do any kind of integration, we look first
at leveraging Boomi because it is so
quick for us to get solutions in place,”
comments Manzanares. “Boomi gives
us the flexibility we need to meet our
customers’ needs.”
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Reference Number: 10013166 © June 2014, Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved
CaseStudy-DaylightTransport-USA-NK-24331