Logistics & Transportation:<br>Happy Employees Part And Parcel Of The JobLogistics & Transportation:<br>Happy Employees Part And Parcel Of The Job

The transportation and logistics industry was hard hit after the attacks of Sept. 11. Once the unprecedented travel bans were removed, security got tighter, and then came the anthrax scare. Challenging doesn't begin to describe the new world that transportation and logistics companies and their employees faced. Not unexpectedly, they turned to IT.

While FedEx Corp.'s 664 aircraft sat idle for 50 hours after the attacks, the shipper used proprietary legacy software that integrates its transportation networks to shunt critical packages to road and rail modes.

After last September, shipping company Yellow Corp. wanted to make the buying experience easier for its customers, so it developed Myyellow.com, a self-service Web site that helps customers expedite their orders. The site, in turn, frees Yellow's service representatives to sell. They look at incoming orders and call customers to suggest service upgrades, says Mike Smid, an executive VP at Yellow. The call-center reps "have the visibility to upgrade shipments," he says.

Perhaps surprisingly, there's an unconscious symbiotic relationship forming between transportation-company employees and their customers. Having more-satisfied employees can result in having more customers who feel satisfied.

To that end, American Airlines, part of AMR Corp., has invested in better information sharing among its employees. In October, American launched Jetnet, an employee portal that reduces confusion by replacing several departmental intranets. Besides giving employees access to their up-to-the-minute personnel data, Jetnet shows workers daily business metrics such as load factors and on-time performance. The goal is to encourage greater team spirit among employees by showing them how the company's doing.

The consequences of a dissatisfied staff can be profound. Just the worry that there would be a strike at United Parcel Service of America Inc. earlier this year put a kink in UPS's business flow. "Brown," as the company is marketing itself nowadays, saw its average daily volume for the first six months of the year drop 2%, compared with the same period last year because of customer uncertainty.

IT can't take the uncertainty out of an unforeseeable future, but transportation and logistics companies are using technology to at least mitigate the gray areas.