Tens of thousands of businesses across the United States depend on Ruan to keep their supply chains moving. As one of the largest privately held transportation and logistics companies in the country, Ruan operates more than 200 locations nationwide, managing a complex fleet with a relentless focus on safety, reliability and service excellence.
With a compliance operation spanning hundreds of locations and thousands of drivers, Ruan sought a solution that could bring greater consistency, efficiency and accountability to its Hours-of-Service (HOS) coaching process. The goal was to find a platform that could support its compliance team in delivering a better experience for drivers while strengthening the organization’s overall approach to HOS management.
Ruan turned to Gridline’s HOS Protect, built on Geotab’s industry-leading telematics infrastructure. Gridline’s platform gave Ruan the tools to centralize its entire HOS coaching process, standardize documentation and escalation procedures across every location, and give its compliance team the visibility and control to manage it all in one place.
Saved by operational teams in the first 9 months
Coaching conversations conducted, overwhelmingly positive
Standardized under one centralized HOS coaching process
In repeat HOS violations since launching the program
Ruan selected Gridline as their Geotab partner. In doing so, they discovered Gridline’s HOS Protect solution – bringing a centralized, scalable approach to standardizing HOS coaching across all locations, with full visibility and control for their compliance team.
For John Holt, who leads Ruan’s Compliance Department and has spent 12 years building and refining the team’s approach, the platform introduced more than new technology. It opened the door to a fundamentally different way of thinking about HOS compliance, one where consistency, documentation and driver support could all be managed from a single point of accountability.
“This could finally be the option to modernize the whole process,” Holt recalled thinking when he first learned about HOS Protect. “It gave us a vision and started us down the path of where we are today.”
Ruan’s Compliance Team centrally monitors, coaches and documents HOS improvements across the entire organization. All reporting, coaching conversations and documentation now flow through Gridline’s solution. The field does not need to manage individual coaching interactions, and operational leaders can stay informed without being pulled into each event.
This model, which Ruan refers to internally as Centralized HOS Coaching, was made possible in part because of how HOS Protect integrates with Geotab’s ELD data. The compliance team has full access to compliance data, which means coaching conversations can happen faster, more consistently and with better context.
Perhaps most importantly, the centralized approach eliminated the variability that naturally exists when coaching is distributed across hundreds of locations. Every driver now goes through the same structured process, regardless of where they are or who their manager is.
“We do all the reporting, all the coaching, all the documentation within Gridline. The field really does not need to see any of it unless they go looking for it. That is how clean the process has become.”
— John Holt, Compliance Manager, RuanImplementing a change of this scale requires more than strong technology. It requires a partner willing to listen and adapt. For Ruan, that has been one of the defining aspects of the relationship with Gridline.
“The Gridline team has been fantastic from the very beginning, even through the pilot stages. I have never worked with a partner who could accommodate requests the way they do. They told us they would have something ready in a couple of weeks, and they meant it. That was a foreign language to me. We have recurring check-in calls, and their leadership stays engaged and invested in how things are going.”
— John Holt, Compliance Manager, RuanThat level of responsiveness has allowed Ruan to fine-tune the program over time, making adjustments as the team learned what was working and where additional support was needed.
Since launching the new process in June 2025, Ruan has seen meaningful results across several areas.
One of the most significant outcomes has been the development of a formal, standardized escalation framework. Previously, how a driver was coached after a violation could vary widely depending on the location or the manager involved. Today, every driver goes through the same structured path, from a first occurrence through subsequent events, with clear and consistent steps at each stage.
The impact has been substantial. Since implementing the standardized process, Ruan has seen a dramatic reduction in repeat violations. Multi-occurrence situations have become rare, reflecting both the effectiveness of the coaching process and drivers’ growing understanding of HOS requirements.
Ruan has long valued common and consistent practices across its operations. The centralized coaching model has reinforced that commitment in a tangible way. Because all coaching now runs through one team using one process, it has created a natural feedback loop that helps ensure everyone is aligned, whether that is a field manager, the after-hours extended operations team or a member of the compliance team itself.
When questions arise about how a situation should be handled, the answer is always grounded in the same documented process. That level of consistency has been one of the results Holt is most proud of.
By centralizing the coaching process within the compliance team, Ruan has also freed up significant time for operational leaders. In the nine months since launch, Ruan estimates that the organization has saved well over 100 hours that would otherwise have been spent on individual coaching and documentation tasks at the field level. That time has been redirected toward what operational leaders do best – running the business.
Perhaps the most telling result is how drivers have responded. HOS regulations exist for a reason. They have been studied, refined and put in place to protect drivers and everyone sharing the road with them, and Ruan takes that responsibility seriously.
Rather than treating every violation as a disciplinary event, Ruan approaches each coaching call as an opportunity to understand what happened and prevent it from happening again. Since launch, feedback from drivers across our coaching interactions has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Our goal is to help drivers understand what happened so we can prevent it going forward. I can’t tell you how many of those calls end with the driver being genuinely thankful. That means a lot to us.”
— John Holt, Compliance Manager, Ruan