"The more information we get, and the more interactive, real-time relationships we have with both key customers and this volume of capacity, the more the apps for the Internet have grown," says CEO Don Schneider, who feels his company spends proportionally more on IT and communications technology than any other carrier.

"We aggregate capacity, figuring out how to take other carriers' capacity and provide visibility to it," says Chris Lofgren, chief information and logistics officer. "FedEx and UPS only have to worry about tracking their own assets." Lofgren predicts that in two years, standards such as Java and XML will let Schneider National have "deep visibility" into business partner and customer systems. "These guys embraced technology a long time ago," says Brian Clancy, a principal at MergeGlobal, a transportation consulting firm.

Clancy says he doubts Schneider National will face a threat from Internet carrier brokerage sites such as the National Transportation Exchange, an online marketplace for excess transportation capacity. But logistics industry experts say the concept is viable, pointing out that in the motor carrier industry alone, capacity may be underutilized by as much as 50%, costing buyers and sellers of transportation services at least $31 billion annually. The marketing hype around frictionless, electronic markets overlooks the real problem of dirty data, Clancy says. "Dirty data rusts all the pipes on the information highway," he says.

In June, Schneider National launched Schneider Brokerage, a secure Web site that lets shippers pick from thousands of approved carriers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The real-time service, called the Schneider Connection, lets shippers find loads and post potential trucking jobs online. The technical infrastructure picked by Schneider emphasizes centralized processing on IBM mainframes. The company's data center in Green Bay, Wis., handles all the traffic for its European, Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. operations.

The reason the Web matters so much to Schneider National, says Lofgren, is that it opens up electronic communications with smaller businesses that haven't been able to use EDI technology, "making them more efficient and taking cost out of our business."

go on to the next story, "Consolidated Trucking: Thinking About IT Every Day."