Roadway handles nearly 60,000 shipments a day. Many of these deliveries contain multiple pieces of freight that move through more than one field location. In addition to tracking the pickup, delivery, and intermediate handling of each shipment, employees in each of Roadway's field offices are responsible for entering detailed information about each shipment such as shipper, consignee, address, product description, pieces and weight. All of this results in an enormous amount of information to be managed.

The system that stores and tracks all of Roadway's critical business information is QUIKTRAK® the company's cutting edge, integrated system for instantaneous freight tracking. At the heart of QUIKTRAK is CCA's Model 204 DBMS. Model 204 stores all of Roadway's mission critical freight operations data including customer, dispatch, freight shipment, billing, shipment tracking, invoicing and computerized rate information.

Model 204 was implemented at Roadway in 1988 when it became apparent that the inaccessibility of real-time data made it difficult for Roadway's field managers to make timely decisions on staffing, drivers, truck availability, shipment routing and related costs. With the implementation of the QUIKTRAK system, Roadway became the first company in the trucking industry to provide instant access to shipment and rate information to its employees and customers, allowing quick response to customers for inbound planning, best-possible routing scenarios and the most cost-effective shipping plans.

Roadway's entire business relies on the reliability, availability and real-time responsiveness of Model 204. Over 2,500 concurrent users access the system, which tracks more than 9 million shipments, houses over 500,000 customer records, and processes over 2 million transactions a day. All of this is achieved with 99.5% availability of system.

With the capabilities provided by Model 204, Roadway's field managers can now make decisions quickly and effectively. The system handles a very high volume of transactions within a very short processing time and has given Roadway the ability to link together a number of databases. Customer satisfaction has also improved now that customers, as well as managers and shipment staff, have real-time knowledge about shipment location and movement.

According to Pam Kelley, Director of IT with Roadway Express, "Model 204 gives us the performance and flexibility we need to manage all of this data with speed and reliability. We chose CCA's Model 204 because it is hands down the best performing database management system on the market - we couldn't run our business without it. It's also extremely cost effective. The software's flexible design and high capacity capabilities continue to save Roadway considerable CPUs, and that's enabled us to delay a capital expenditure on a new mainframe system."

Model 204's high performance, high capacity capabilities have made Roadway's shipment management and tracking system a business application worthy of note. The system was selected as the premier database application at the 1996 Very Large Database Summit and, for the 12th year, Roadway Express was selected by Distribution Magazine as a winner of its "Quest for Quality" award. In short, CCA and Model 204 have proven they can deliver for Roadway Express.