Estes Express
Keeping the Supply Chain Moving with ControlUp

Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Estes Express is the largest, privately owned freight shipping company in North America. Their wide range of services include domestic and international truckload transportation, specialized delivery services, and B2B and B2C shipping solutions. Estes has a reputation for delivering high-quality service and superior logistical expertise through their diverse spectrum of shipping and supply chain management that stretches to almost anywhere on the map.An asset-based freight transportation and custom logistics solutions provider, Estes manages a fleet of more than 8,000 tractors and 32,600+ trailers, not to mention a network of 265+ terminals and more than 20,000 employees. Add to this a shipment volume of more than 12,161,900 units, and that’s a lot of moving parts (no pun intended). To manage the logistics of all this and keep their customers’ deliveries on schedule, it’s imperative that their information systems are running smoothly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This is why they turned to ControlUp.

An IT Traffic Jam

Tom Hamilton, Sr. Engineer, Infrastructure Services, manages Estes Express’ Citrix-based infrastructure. Before deploying ControlUp, his team used another tool that he says was less than ideal. “It was enormously time-consuming; it would take my team forever to find the data they were looking for and there was no easy way to find it,” Hamilton says. So they started looking for a solution that worked.

For Estes Express, finding something that was simple was key. The tool had to have built-in reporting, and the price point had to be right. They evaluated several solutions—some were too expensive, others gathered too much data, which would only get in the way of Estes doing its part to keep America’s goods rolling down the highway.

The Solution

For Estes Express, ControlUp was just the ticket. The price was right, they said, but that wasn’t all. Estes had started out simply looking for something that would provide basic reporting. ControlUp gave them so much more. “ControlUp has been a huge time-saver for us,” Hamilton says. “The time we spend each day on reporting has been shortened by more than 10x. The value in that is huge.”

Estes quickly implemented ControlUp Automate, whose triggers and script actions allow them to stay ahead of and mitigate issues in their environment before their end users’ productivity is negatively impacted or before they are even aware there’s a problem. The platform has shortened their help desk queues and has allowed the team to focus their attention on the business and improving their services, ensuring—especially questions continue to emerge about how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect the global supply chain and the vital role they play—that they can keep the wheels of business turning.

ControlUp: Delivering Great Results for Estes Express

Estes Express has been using ControlUp since 2017. In the time since, the company has gone through unprecedented growth. In 2020 alone, because of unprecedented growth in ecommerce and never-before-seen pressures on the nation’s freight, the company has added hundreds of new drivers, expanded their terminal network to more than 10,000 doors, and ControlUp has become their go-to tool for managing their Citrix environment.

“I would recommend anyone that is looking for a monitoring tool to give ControlUp a try and see how easy it is to use and to see how powerful the built-in tools can be to every day management of your environment,” Hamilton says. We couldn’t say it any better than that.