I thought I would take a few moments to describe a typical day in operations, and what we spend our time doing here at Challenger. Typically, a morning starts by going through “the numbers” (such as on-time pickup and delivery, total miles run compared to plan, empty miles, productivity per driver and miles per gallon). After we have all had the opportunity to review these stats, we have our daily morning meeting to communicate many key indicators. The morning meeting has representation from all departments such as Sales, Maintenance, Operations, Safety, HR, Information Technology and Recruiting and allows all sides of Challenger to be included in our goals. Our morning meeting is designed to be quick and efficient and typically lasts no more than 15 minutes. In this meeting we cover many of our key indicators such as freight required in key locations to keep drivers rolling and we set the tone for the day. We also have one of our enabling departments talk about some of their key initiatives and the regional planners talk about their regions and capacity.

Over the course of the day many of the managers and supervisors are working diligently with drivers to ensure that they are getting miles, working with maintenance to ensure our equipment is in good working order, solving day-to-day concerns and most of all, ensuring that everyone is remaining safe!

We also dedicate some of the day looking to the future to ensure that we understand our capacity to provide excellent service to our customers while ensuring we are maximizing productivity for our drivers and our equipment.

Before you know it, the day is over and we look forward to tomorrow!

Shawn Novak
Central Regional Manager
www.challenger.com