The problem with implementing Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) is confronting the sins of your past. Electronic logs don’t allow the flexibility of paper logs. That may mean some routes will have to be changed; some customers may receive freight a day later than they have become used to; and some salespeople, trip planners, and dispatchers will have to rethink what they promise. And some drivers may see three-day trips turn into four-day trips, or find themselves stranded by the clock just an hour from home.

With that said, ELDs have been shown to improve productivity, give drivers back time they never knew they had, and make it much easier to plan routes and schedule deliveries. Yes, there will be unavoidable delays due to things like congestion and weather, but in a well-managed fleet they will be the exception rather than the norm, and will prove to be nothing worse than the inevitable operational SNAFU that all fleets occasionally encounter.

It all depends on how the fleet manages the transition. Some do it better than others.

Donald Broughton, managing director of U.S. industry analysts firm Avondale Partners, raised more than a few eyebrows at a conference two years ago when he said ELDs were directly or indirectly responsible for the failure of hundreds of small U.S. fleets. Broughton said these fleets were ordered by the U.S. federal regulator, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, to use electronic logs following audits that revealed large-scale Hours of Service violations.

It wasn’t that the fleets were irredeemable, but that they managed the transition badly. They were not able to maintain service levels under tighter controls, and drivers left the companies because of reduced earnings.

It would be a mistake to assume that every small fleet embarking on an ELD program is set up to fail, but it’s true that those which do not manage the transition deftly will struggle.   

“I would not say that all companies would fail switching from paper to ELD,” says Kate Rahn, director of sales at Shaw Tracking. “If the fleets are proactive and diligent about ensuring that their drivers are running legal already, and fleets whose drivers that are generally operating a 12-hour day in Canada, [they] would not have an issue. Carriers that have drivers who are operating close to [the limits] or are ‘dealing’ with delays in ways the company may not even been aware of will need a plan.”

Rahn says the companies need to be proactive and deal with the issue early and head-on. 

“This will allow them the time to address lingering issues with shippers and receivers, to improve communications and to implement any training or procedure changes with their dispatch and operations team,” she adds.

Talk is cheap – and effective

With FMCSA’s decision to require ELDs beginning in December 2017, shippers have suddenly become very interested in Hours of Service. It may have finally dawned on them that trucking businesses are not going to tolerate wasted time. Now would be a great time to open that dialogue with customers if you haven’t already.

“Shippers are really interested in how ELDs are going to impact delivery time,” says Tom Reader, director of marketing for ELDs at JJ Keller and Associates. “They want to know, is there going to be more turnover in the driver population? Are delivery schedules going to be impacted? And which carriers have ELDs installed because they are concerned about compliance from a scheduling point of view?”

Having hard data about the dwell times at loading docks also gives carriers new leverage that before was just anecdotal.

“Once we get to this electronic space, will it change the landscape for carriers, customers or shippers, especially around detention time,” asks Elise Chianelli, director of safety and compliance at PeopleNet. “I know that a lot of carriers use that information to negotiate with their shippers, to see whether they can really make things move or not. At least the data starts to become more readily available on how much time is being spent on the end of these docks.”

Margaret Hogg, general manager of Toronto-based JG Drapeau, told Today’s Trucking that when she introduced electronic logs in 2013, they had a few routes into Illinois that had to be adjusted.

“I went out and explained everything to them and now they are completely happy with it,” she says. “They’re fine, they understand. It’s about teaching some of your clients this stuff and really going over it with them.”

Some fleets have found that certain drivers do a very good job at managing their time, while others do not. Electronic logs reveal shortcomings very quickly, when one driver can make a certain delivery while another cannot. With paper, they were both able to successfully complete the trip. It may be that drivers just do not understand some of the nuances of Hours of Service.

“When we first told our drivers we were going to transition to electronic logs there was resistance, fear and trepidation,” notes Melanie Legros, compliance supervisor at Vitesse Trucking Services in Lachine, Quebec. “They were concerned about their earnings, which is understandable, but we found in talking with them that many of them didn’t fully understand the [Hours of Service] rules. Learning to manage the device was just a small part of the training we provided before going completely electronic. We also had to re-teach many of the fundamentals of the [Hours of Service] rules.”

The upshot for Vitesse was the drivers came away happy, earning just as much money, if not more, and violations have virtually disappeared.

“We found that in most cases they had the time they needed to complete the trip, but they had to manage it better,” she says. “It wasn’t that the routes were impossible, though some of them did require some adjustment.”

Adjustment is the important factor, and sometimes that means making changes internally.

Ploger Transportation, a 30-truck irregular route carrier based in Bellevue, Ohio, switched to ELDs in 2006. Joel Morrow, Ploger’s director of research and development, says the transition fundamentally changed the way the company does business for the better. 

“It really puts the onus on the salespeople and dispatch to build better loads and do a better job for the driver,” he says. “We upped the pay to the drivers and if they get hung up on the road, we pay them. It really changed the focus of our operation from expecting drivers to work around all the problems with the loads we gave them, to providing drivers with a plan they can work with.” 

Ploger is a pretty small fish in the big U.S. pond, and at one time, as Morrow delicately puts it, “was in danger of becoming one of Broughton’s statistics.”

“By far we are a better fleet today because we made the change,” he says. “Importantly, we restructured the operation. We didn’t simply switch to electronic logs and hope everything worked out. We planned it out and we made it work for the drivers. Along the way we had to let go a senior dispatcher who just didn’t or wouldn’t get it.”

Life will change when fleets switch to ELDs. Preparation and communication are probably the key factors to the success of the transition. Like much in life, there are three approaches to this sort of problem: You either make things happen, watch things happen, or wonder what happened. You can guess which of those types likely wound up on Broughton’s list.