When regional LTL carrier Circle Delivery saw missed pick-ups on the rise at its Chicago terminal, CEO Greg Brown knew something had to be done quickly.

“We may be a small family-owned company, but we’ve always strived to provide our customers with the finest service available in our industry,” Brown said. “The challenge has always been how to do that while remaining profitable.”
For Brown, the answer was to replace the old manual dispatch and delivery system with new technology that would afford them the same visibility into their fleet’s activities as used by larger carriers. He examined a number of integrated solutions, and finally settled on Cheetah Freight, from Cheetah Software Systems.
“Cheetah allowed us to get all the same benefits as other packages we looked at, but for a fraction of the cost,” Brown said. “With Cheetah’s ASP model, we were able to offer our customers the same services they would get from much larger companies, without having to purchase a lot of new hardware or adding IT staff.”
Jack Lakinger, manager of Circle’s Chicago terminal, notes that with Cheetah’s real-time logistics solution, the CSR call volume has decreased dramatically, and the radio chatter has disappeared. “The Cheetah system has allowed us to get much more work done in a much less stressful environment,” Lakinger said.
Lakinger also noted that their end-of-day line haul planning is getting done two to three hours earlier. “We no longer have to wait for all the trucks to come in to get our planning done,” he said. “Cheetah lets us know what each truck has on board, the number of pieces or skids, their weights and destination zips, before they hit the terminal.”
Brown also reports that because a lot of the information needed to create bills is input by their drivers throughout the course of the day, it can reduce the amount of data input his biller has to make by at least 150 keystrokes per bill.