IT hits the highway: Big rigs go high tech

Those were the words that J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. received from Scholastic Corp., the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, as it prepared to ship tractor-trailer loads of the final book in the wildly popular series to distributors' warehouses nationwide last summer.

The publisher was determined not to release any copies of the book before the official on-sale date. One reason why Scholastic chose J.B. Hunt over other trucking services was the carrier's ability to ensure that "we knew where the load was and that it couldn't be delivered early," says Kay Palmer, CIO and executive vice president.

J.B. Hunt had a three-hour window in which it was expected to distribute hundreds of trailer-loads of books to locations nationwide. The company staged the delivery by picking up the books from the printer early and storing them in secure, fenced holding areas positioned within 150 miles of every delivery location.

The operations center used GPS technology to gain visibility into these areas by monitoring the location of every trailer hourly. Operations could also "ping" each trailer, and, using data from infrared sensors inside each trailer, check that the contents were inside.

To ensure that the trailers remained securely on location, the trucking company used a technique called geofencing to create a virtual perimeter around each distribution point. If a trailer moved just one-tenth of a mile beyond that invisible perimeter line (set by specifying surrounding longitude and latitude coordinates around each address), the system alerted the dispatch center.