On the road with J.B. Hunt

摘要

Plan for common, not unique, requirements. That advice, from Tracy Black, vice president of application development at J.B. Hunt Transport, could save you millions. Black and the application development team at J.B. Hunt's Dedicated Contract Services (DCS) unit came to this realization the hard way. The team went through many ups and downs in a four-year, $6.4 million application development project aimed at addressing a serious problem within DCS — overly complex, decentralized account management. So arduous was the project, dubbed the Pace system, that DCS nearly scrapped it. But persistence paid off.Today, DCS projects a $30 million, three-year ROI for Pace. And Pace has morphed from a custom-coding project to a flexible, componentized Web services-based system that gives field managers and customers account access anytime, from anywhere.