Like almost every other executive in her business of moving households, Maureen Beal is simultaneously amused and perplexed by the public image of her industry.
“People think movers sit there in their undershirts with a can of beer taking orders over the phone,” said Beal, chief executive of National Van Lines Inc., based in suburban Broadview.
She was speaking while attired in a business suit, one of the few female chief executives in a male-dominated industry that has a decidedly low-tech public image– burly, sweating men hauling heavy sofas and refrigerators in and out of dingy moving vans. She also had a personal computer displaying a spreadsheet sitting within easy reach on the credenza behind her.
Beal said she is proud that her privately held company was one of the first in its industry to begin adapting to computer technology as early as the 1960s. Those were the days when even modestly powered computers took up entire rooms.
These days, the burly men still schlep sofas, but the moving industry increasingly uses such things as bar code technology, global positioning systems and the Internet to compete.
Nationally known moving companies such as National, Allied Van Lines and Bekins Van Lines Inc. really don’t do the heavy lifting themselves. They are coordinators of interstate moves and operate through independently owned local agents (such as Pickens-Kane in Chicago) who actually conduct the moves. The agents in turn hire the drivers, who are independent owner operators.
Some of the largest of the nation’s 5,000 moving companies–most of which are concentrated in the Midwest–are transforming themselves into logistics companies that not only handle all details of moving transferred employees from Des Plaines to Des Moines but increasingly are selling themselves as a way other firms can outsource their distribution systems.
Venerable Bekins, which dates from 1891, has become GeoLogistics Corp., although it retains the original name on its household moving business because it’s such a well-known brand.
Customers at rival Allied can go to the company Web site to e-mail complaints to headquarters and–in some instances–can track the progress of vans hauling their goods across country.
The Internet works both ways, however. If the company can set up a Web site, so can disgruntled customers. And some of them have posted complaints for all the world to see at www.bekinsbeware.org. One unhappy couple who recently moved from California to New Jersey posted their complaint that “Bekins broke or lost a significant chunk of our stuff.”
“What we can’t change dramatically is the basic moving process,” said Michael Fergus, president and chief executive of Allied Van Lines–the Naperville-based American subsidiary of the NFC (National Freight Consortium) PLC in London. “It’s strong men moving heavy items long distances.”
“The Internet hasn’t yet had as big an effect on the industry as I think it will,” said Joe Harrison, president of the 3,500-member American Moving and Storage Association in Alexandria, Va.
The fact that the household moving business has been relatively flat at about 1.3 million interstate moves a year for the last decade has driven many companies to cast around for new business, Harrison added. The market they discovered was commercial moving–everything from entire factories to trade show displays and large, expensive manufactured products.
That has been the driving force behind the use of increasingly sophisticated computer systems, global positioning satellites and the Internet because companies want to know exactly where in transit their inventory happens to be at any given moment.
“To evolve into what we have become, we have to use electronic commerce,” said Larry A. Marzullo, who wears dual hats as chief executive of both Bekins and GeoLogistics Network Solutions, headquartered in west suburban Hillside. “We want our customers to place orders electronically as well as track them.”
On the household moving side, movers have used computers to cut corporate overhead costs because competition since the early 1980s when the industry was deregulated has kept a lid on rates, he added.
Computers are a big part of rival Allied’s strategy to keep customers happy.
“We had done a customer survey in-house that told us 92 percent of our customers were happy. The only problem was that all 92 percent of them weren’t coming back for another move,” said Fergus, president and chief executive.
So Allied hired the Gallup Organization, which found only 68 percent were satisfied with their moves.
The company now lets customers file damage claims on the Internet as well as track the progress of the vans moving their household goods. Customers in a pilot program receive a code number they can punch into the Allied Web site to track their own truck as frequently as every hour if the vehicle is equipped with a global positioning system.
Thus Allied dutifully posted the fact that a van to haul Robert Berman’s household goods to his semiretirement home in Arizona was due at his north suburban Northfield doorstep at 10 a.m. Oct. 30, although he didn’t bother to check the Web, and got the news by phone.
Allied’s Web site also reported the van passed through Show Low, Ariz., at 8:25 a.m. last Wednesday, about 135 miles from its destination and dropped off another load in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert the next day. According to the Internet, the van arrived at Berman’s new home in Sun City West, Ariz., at 8:20 a.m. Friday.
“These days, people want to know not only the day of the delivery but the exact hour. They don’t have time to stay home for days waiting for the van,” Fergus said.
Like its competitors, Allied is also getting into the business of handling all the details of employee moves–a task corporations are increasingly outsourcing to cut costs at a time when the average cost of relocating an employee is pushing $50,000, moving industry officials said. The cost of the move itself is only about a tenth of that, Harrison said.
These relocation companies provide counseling, inform customers of the tax consequences of a move, help with the sale of the old home and the purchase of the new one, and book a mover.
Movers for years have handled commercial relocations–everything from lugging office furniture between buildings to hauling the bones of Sue, the Field Museum’s Tyrannosaurus, to Chicago from New York. But GeoLogistics is advancing the art considerably.
It will provide a computer model for a corporate distribution system for large and high-value goods. It also will do a computer analysis of a company’s existing distribution system. It will even operate a distribution system for a company.
“Companies are outsourcing their logistics. They don’t want to make the investment in warehouses and distribution systems, so we run the warehouses and supply chains for them,” said GeoLogistics’ Marzullo.
Bekins has 70 warehouses for household goods scattered around the country that can be used for commercial products as well.
Despite her company’s early interest in computers and the fact that the federal government is beginning to place moving orders via the Internet, Beal said she is still not sure how far technology can go in replacing human muscles in the business of moving household goods.
“Moving household goods is not like freight when an order comes up suddenly and you need to get hold of your driver right away,” she said.
