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A COMPLEX CONUNDRUM?
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Roadrunner Professional is a multi-site transport management package that certainly packs some clout.., but is it too complex for its own good? Robin Meczes takes a closer look.
anaging a transport business isn't e asy. You have to juggle drivers, veh icles, trailers, customers, subcontractors and individual jobs. You need to work out how best to deploy your drivers and vehicles to get those jobs done, while keeping an eye on costs and vehicle maintenance and ensuring each job is properly invoiced once it has been completed.
That's a tough enough job with a simple operation — add to that the complexity of carrying out all these tasks across multiple sites with a disparate workforce involved in the process and it's no wonder many transport managers look much older than their years.
This is where multi-site transport management software such as Road Tech Computer Systems' Roadrunner Professional can make a big difference.
Roadrunner Professional is a longestablished transport management system that has been continually updated over the years and has a wide user base of some 1,400 companies. Among its latest converts is the Pall-Ex pallet network, which is just rolling the system out across I 40 individual users. Longerstanding converts include such well known names as Widdowson Group and CRW (see liiser Views, page 80). So when CM was offered a chance to try a copy of this software , we were naturally keen to take it for a spin.
The wide scope of Roadrunner Professional is quite something. But before you can get around to that, you'll need to enter the details of all your drivers, vehicles, trailers, customers, depots and subcontractors. Once that's done, you can start to enter actual jobs, with details of who the customer is, what the consignment consists (*starting and ending points, time of day, the rate, and so on.
All the jobs will appear in a user-configurable diary screen, which is colour-coded so you can quickly determine the status of each one as it progresses from being booked to underway, and from completed to final invoice.
The software will, of course, help you with that invoicing.And it will help you with a lot more, too such as creating manifests for drivers, keeping track of pallet movements, working out trunking legs, maintaining rate cards for subcontractors and customers -even logging the running costs for each vehicle, trailer or driver.
Then there's a nice utility that lets you enter the details of any driver, vehicle or trailer that's going to be off-road for any length of time: it then prevents you from allocating them jobs. It will even keep track of trailer fill as each unit goes through the working day, as long as you've entered the trailer capacity in the first place, that is. You can set up profiles and templates for common customers orjobs to make data entry that much quicker.
If you still want more, there's a feature that lets you see how busy each vehicle, driver or trailer is for any working day or week, Looking at things the other way around, you can quickly check which staff and resources are unallocated, then drag and drop them to jobs as necessary to help keep them busy.There's also a facility to upload electronic POD signature captures.
Shortcut buttons let you share data about new jobs with other users on the network or even with drivers equipped with suitable in-cab devices, including Cablink, Road Tech's own vehicle telematics system.
Then, of course, there are the reporting functions. Want to see jobs by customer, vehicle, driver, trailer or contractor for any given period? No problem. How about an overview of PODs by customer. driver, vehicle, trailer, contractor or job? Again, no problem. Should all the basic reports produced by Roadrunner Professional not prove enough for you, however, you can get even more sophisticated reporting options via a bolt-on reporting suite called Relativity.
Space doesn't permit us to detail each of these features-but take it from us, there really isn't much more you might want the software to cover. In this respect, Roadrunner Professional is second to none-at least none we've seen. Driving impression While the features and functions of Roadrunner Professional are well and truly beyond reproach, we're not sure the same can always be said for the user interface.
Most of it is very good. Entering data and jobs is easy enough; the diary screen works very well, and the ability to open multiple windows showing jobs, drivers, vehicles, and so on. is very useful (and not always an option in some compering products),even if you can't always resize those windows as you might wish. But there are still two issues that left us a bit uncertain about the ease of use.
First, the software's very complexity makes it, perhaps inevitably, somewhat complex to use and you will definitely need some kind of training.Admittedly we didn't get any training, but still couldn't help feeling that many of the processes and procedures within Roadrunner were less than intuitive, those for invoicing and report generation being] ust two examples.
The second issue with ease of use is that not everything seems to work quite as it should.
One example is that some data entry fields aren't long enough to accommodate reasonable entries. For example, e-mail address fields that cut the'.uk' off bkiill@bloggs.co.uk is hardly a long entry and postal address fields that won't let you put '19 Wilberforce Gardens' on a single line.
Then there are the vehicle odometer records, which allow you to enter total vehicle mileage and mileage at the time of your purchase, only to then miscalculate the distance you have used the vehicle over by adding up the two source figures rather than subtracting one from the other.
We couldn't really look at the vehicle costings function at all, because all our attempts to define some cost categories upon which the whole costing function seems to depend -proved fruitless.
All we got for our trouble was a greyed-out category descriptions box, which we could neither access nor get rid of without shutting down the whole system.
We were also surprised to find that Roadrunner had no problem letting us allocate the same vehicle to two different jobs in different places at the same time to our mind this is a definite no-no for a system purporting to help you manage your transport resources.
RoadTech tells us the misreported vehicle mileage problem was down to 'conflicting flags'; that the vehicle costings categories need to be .initialised' before they can be used: and that the software can be set up to prevent double bookings but isn't generally, as the jobs could be within a stone's throw of one another in which case it would be more or less possible to handle them simultaneously with a single vehicle. Fair enough, perhaps; and we're sure Road Tech can tweak the settings on each installation as the user requires to get around all these problems But why even start with data entry fields that are too short for the data they were designed for, or with a default setting that allows for the exceptional occasions where a double-booking is what the user intended, rather than just a cock-up?
Documentation-wise we didn't get any kind of manual, although the software's built-in help files did get us through most of our queries. Having said that, while the 'help" files were good at telling you how to do things, they didn't necessarily tell you why you'd want to do them.Would you know instinctively what 'pre-invoicing' was, for instance?
Conclusions
All of which makes it a bit tricky to know just how to rate Roadrunner Professional. On the one hand. it's almost certainly the most function-rich piece of transport management software we've had the pleasure to encounter; on the other, it's among the more complex to try to fathom and it requires user-specific tweaks to work entirely as you might want it to in some areas.
In the end, if you're after a package that can handle multiple users across multiple depots, we reckon you'd be foolish not to give this system a second look, given its very rich functionality. From what we hear, Road Tech looks after its customers very well and we're confident real-life users will end up with the system they'd hoped for. Just make sure you get all the training that's going though-we reckon you're going to need it. •