Safety and service go together as Pace’s teammates help our customers achieve their logistics goals. Delivering the right product, to the right place, and at the right time is what our service is all about. Accomplishing this safely is essential to all of us.
The Pace Fantasy Freight League was created this year to bring fun, healthy competition to Pace’s operational success – defined by service excellence, meeting GP goals, and most importantly – safety. Fantasy leagues exists across many different sports and competitive organizations, including the National Football League and Major League Baseball. Perhaps some of us at Pace even put a great deal of study into our Fantasy league drafts and weekly standings. Professional teams that have a strong roster of players are noted in fantasy insights and garner a lot of attention during the season. Pace’s deep roster in Operations has us wondering, which division across the Pace network will take home The Casey Cup?
Two Pace teammates presented the concept to Chief Operating Officer Casey Crook. “We had done something similar at a previous company, and we thought it would be a fun way for us at Pace to create a competition as a pathway toward improved operations,” he said. “We’ve been discussing and planning for ways to improve our results regarding safety, service levels, and managing expense, and this will be a fun way to do it. The Fantasy Freight League sets up a friendly competition between our different terminals to help us achieve the benchmark results we are aiming for.”
Casey was enthusiastically on board. “The scoring is based on each team’s ability to block and tackle well,” he said. “Did you close out today’s orders 100%? Are the drivers closing out their own orders or is someone having to do it for them? How well are we tracking our BOLs? Are the CommVault requests kept up with on a daily basis so we can pay our partners correctly? These are all fundamental tasks that have traditionally caused us operational pain and getting them resolved through a little bit of competition is going to be awesome.”
With Casey’s blessing, “The League” was announced to fellow Ops leaders on May 3rd, stating that “the Fantasy Freight League is based on the competitive nature of our team to win every day and our drive as a team for continual improvement.” To make the competition as fair as possible, the league is divided into three divisions, with each division competing for bragging rights and The Casey Cup.
The leagues’ weekly standings are derived from our operating data on a Sunday through Saturday basis. Terminal versus terminal play began on May 17th. Those bracketed competitions will continue for five weeks. After five weeks, the top four terminals in each division will have play-offs over the next two weeks for their divisional championships.
“It’s a short season, Quarter 2,” remarked one Pace team member. “We’re looking at the 2nd quarter as our warm -up for what we see as a very competitive 3rd Quarter season. After that, our belief is that we will all be really humming as we get into Q4, which of course is Peak,” he continued.
Acknowledging the rivalries being created, Casey said, “We have a very competitive group. No one takes losing well, and there is never any shortage of friendly banter,” said Casey. Within this league, it seems it may be our competitive spirit that will drive us toward exceeding our service, financial, and safety goals.
“It’s going to be a blast, watching all of our terminals competing, and along with that all of us getting better!” said another teammate. Indeed, it will.
