Omnitracs' Road Ahead blog

What It Takes: A View of ELD Compliance From an ELD Project Director

Joe
Joe Ohr
Senior Operations Director

The ELD Mandate is one of the biggest trucking industry disruptors to happen in our lifetime. I have been at Omnitracs for 17 years, been a part of some of the largest projects, and worked with our largest customers. And never has anything come along that has impacted Omnitracs or the industry like the ELD Mandate. 

The previous AOBRD regulation was brief, just a page and half. The ELD Mandate is far more thorough, over 140 pages — which does not include the more than 400 pages of preamble and testing requirements. The effort to create an ELD solution compliant with these regulations is the largest undertaking Omnitracs has taken on since the initial launch in 1988, and is certainly the largest project I’ve ever managed.

For the past 12 months, the ELD project was managed with the same levels of urgency that companies used during the Y2K upgrades — it’s been all hands on deck. 

The entire company rallied behind the project to see it completed and examples of these sacrifices and achievements were evident across the entire organization:

  • Every Omnitracs employee has completed training on the ELD Mandate, regardless of their role.  
  • We held, and continue to hold, weekly leadership meetings to give updates on each functional area of the project. 
  • We held “ELD Summits” where we would discuss the regulation guidelines and translate those into software requirements.
  • Once we thought that we figured it all out, we went on the road and presented our ELD solution to hundreds of our customers. 
  • We built a new ERODS infrastructure and scaled the environment for the new ELD code requirements.
  • We created new visor cards, videos, and training material for drivers going from an AOBRD to ELD and paper to ELD.
  • One feature we included was to enable customers to pace their transition to the new platform by running AOBRDs and ELDs simultaneously. This concept isn’t even an ELD Mandate requirement. 
  • The applications underwent vigorous testing to ensure we had a stable and reliable application.

All of this and more came together one Sunday evening when we submitted our documentation to the FMCSA for self-certification for the first of several Omnitracs platforms. The work is far from finished, however, as we work toward completing work on additional platforms, and continue our commitment to continuous improvement across the portfolio.  

Watching an entire organization join for this event has been nothing short of amazing. This has been a more than two-year effort — and like many other Omnitracs employees, my entire family now knows what ELD stands for.

We look forward to getting all of our customers ready for December.