Prime Logistics Newsletter | 2024 At A Glance

Read this article for a quick recap of 2024.

Banner image taken by bujău

2024 In Words

2024 continued our trend of growth, seeing even higher driver numbers and the release of so many projects! Deep dives into all of our departments can be found below, we hope you enjoy reading them!

Management

It’s been a wild ride during 2024. Crazy how we’ve gone through so much and we still aren’t even close to being done.

Let’s start with Q1 of 2024. We were focused on re-prioritising and completing our to-do backlog, alongside going through all suggestions to get the ball rolling with some ideas! This quarter, we held an internal survey for the staff team to identify ways Management can improve to ensure Prime can be the best it can be. We have been working on handling internal changes and improving our activity within Management alongside new targets for us to aim for, following the results of our internal survey.

We had our first Management change in over a year in February, where, sadly, Branko departed the Management team and VTC, due to lack of time. We want to thank Branko again for his 2+ years of service in Management. Following Branko's departure, we began internal processes to fill the vacancy of Chief Marketing Officer. It was a difficult decision to make as there were many great candidates, but proceeded to go with Rider, our new Chief Marketing Officer since March 19th!

Moving along now with Q2. This one is a little lengthy! During the month of April, we, Management, created our own union. Unfortunately, it got shut down as of April 2nd. We would rather see drivers resolve issues with us directly and felt that the union had no impact on our usual way of suggestions. While it was sad that the union got disbanded, we started doing monthly meetings to discuss all kinds of things, such as issues within the VTC or Staff Team, suggestions, and discuss any other important information.

Since May, Trello made a limitation on how many people can be on a board and therefore, made us have to migrate to GitHub. It has positively impacted the team as we can now effectively work and keep track of our suggestions and tasks. During that month, we were also working on a very thoughtful project that would merge both the Human Resources Team and the Recruitment Team. This project was thought of, discussed properly, and has been executed slowly throughout the past year in 2024.

Moving past those issues, we celebrated pride in June. We had a fun time supporting and appreciating our LGBTQ+ friends. While we’ve had a lot of team changes during this quarter, we were very saddened to see that we had to off-board Directors who have been here for years. While we had to deal with that, we also had to deal with replacing them with someone else to support the team and help out. Management always despises dealing with the change of Directors due to the number of years they always stay in their role and the dedication that has been put in. Last but not least, Management has agreed with the Media Team to display our asset team mods on Steam Workshop. This will be worked on by Bastet, our COO at some point!

Throughout Q2, Management has excelled at getting things done behind the scenes by answering feedback tickets, discord tickets, working on suggestions, making improvements to the VTC, and so much more.

Q3 wasn’t much, however the things we did were not noteworthy as it was the usual tickets, feedback/appeals, management of the VTC, getting ready for our anniversary and so on. It was the normal routine things you’d do as Management here in Prime.

In this quarter, we finally finished planning the merge, and were starting to do the backend stuff on our Discord, DriversHub, TruckersMP VTC Page and so on. Next, we introduced a new CAO! Budo has left after 4 years of service. It’s always sad to see Staff, especially Management leave after so long! Budo has done so much for the VTC and we appreciate everything he has provided for our VTC. He was a legend and has made an impact during his years with us. After his departure, we opened up CAO applications for our Human Resources and Examination Directors; we had great applicants who showed how dedicated they were to our VTC. However, after a tough decision, we ended up choosing iEnMity on September 23rd. iEnMity was the last driver that got to join our Human Resources Team, all the way back in January 2022! He’s worked his way up to Director Of Human Resources, to which he showed true dedication and his hard-working capabilities. He’s improved and changed a lot within the team. He also took on an extra internal team; the Support Team, to which he managed by himself alongside Matt for any extra help. He was our choice to go with and we are super happy to see the progress he has made through his journey to CAO!

Look, it was Q4 and already the end of the year. During Q4 we didn’t do a lot due to preparing for the holidays. We’ve gained and lost a few staff members but also opened up applications with the help of our Directors. While we didn’t do much, we still did our day-to-day operations up until we went on break during December - January.

During the 2024 year, we had lots of ups and downs, however, we always managed. We were able to successfully stay open for yet another year! We hope 2025 is a better year for all of us here at Prime Logistics!

Human Resources

This year, we welcomed a total of 849 new people into our VTC! We received 1308 applications in total, resulting in a 64.91% acceptance rate. Compared to last year, our acceptance rate has increased by 4.19%, and the number of applications received has decreased by 9.54%. Between 2022 and 2023, we saw an 8.83% decrease in applications, so the trend seems to be continuing.

However, even though we are seeing decreases in applications, our driver count keeps increasing, reaching 1002 drivers in December 2024, breaking the 1,000 driver barrier! An amazing accomplishment, all thanks to our drivers sticking around with us and our amazing Staff Team.

This year saw the merge of the Human Resources Team and the Recruitment Team. With this merge, responsibilities of members of both teams were combined to increase the efficiency of our operations. This merge was successfully completed in December and operations have continued smoothly since.

Below we have provided statistics relating to all Human Resources tasks throughout the year.

Event Team

This year, we attended a total of 365 convoys, 1 less than days in the year! Compared to 2023, this is 6 less convoys overall. We had 46 days without a convoy this year, which is a large jump from the 31 days last year. We hope to reduce this in 2025 and ensure a consistent stream of convoys for our drivers to attend.

We hosted 92 convoys this year, a decrease from the 102 convoys last year. This is as a result of our convoys becoming Bi-Weekly from the Summer Break onwards. This decision was made due to the large workload of our Event Team. By making our convoys bi-weekly, we ensure that our events will continue to be of a high standard.

Overall driver attendance remained relatively similar to last year at both Prime-hosted and public convoys, with a slight increase in the consistency of public convoy attendance.

This was a busy year for the Event Team, and we hope to continue providing you with high-quality events throughout the coming year!

Development

After the successful launch of the new Drivers Hub "v1.0.0" in October, to start the year off, we were targeting Q1 to release v1.1.0. We’re happy to report that we completed this on time!

In January, we released v1.1.0 of the Drivers Hub, which consisted of migrating staff modules from the legacy Drivers Hub. With having many staff modules to assist our team with their duties, this took a good amount of time! Alongside the staff module migration, we refactored our pop-up notification system on the Drivers Hub in addition to some user interface changes of our buttons across the Drivers Hub. The importance of this update is that it is an enabler to future projects and modules on the Drivers Hub as we needed to migrate from the legacy hub to be able to implement new and exciting tasks from our backlog which we hope you will see throughout 2024.

Following our January update, we also released v1.2.0 which introduced some staff modules which are vital to our operations. This included a custom Twitter API handler following changes made to TweetDeck (Now known as X Pro, thanks Elon!). We have also been releasing plenty of bug fixes to ensure the Drivers Hub works as expected!

In Q1 we also had Codeize join us on a trial basis to help out with a new version of the Discord bot and, in the future, Drivers Hub features!

During Q2 we were able to fix the #jobs channel. This had many problems with some drivers' jobs not showing up in the channel. Due to drivers wanting it fixed, we figured out a way to fix it and make it more accurate with our drivers logging their jobs.

Within the staff team, we’ve had multiple suggestions to which we’ve accepted, worked on and implemented. Our ticket system has been pretty busy with reporting bugs all over the place by our Support Team and Drivers. We are still trying to figure out how to prioritise each and every bug report we got from everyone.

While the divisions have positively impacted our VTC with having more than 800+ in total, however, quite a lot of drivers change their division within a short amount of time without realizing they had to wait before switching to the MP division or SP division. We’ve added a cooldown timer for division switching which has helped our Recruitment Team tremendously with the amount of division transfers they were getting that were invalid.

In Q3, we did a few things we mentioned. We finally added logging via Passkey without entering an email, distance locale (ability to view miles instead of kilometres), and having an active bonus shown on the dashboard. Those were very exciting developer updates for our DriversHub!

While it was some time that Code joined us in the Dev team, we can now speak about the progress he had in Q3. He started working on our 7th version of the bot. We hope that this will be the last major revision of the bot for the foreseeable future, but who knows! We love bots and love coding them! Our current bot has been contributed to by Joshua (Director of Public Relations), Nathan (Chief Technology Officer) and Bastet (Chief Operating Officer). While we love the code they produced, we felt it was time to change the bot in an effort to increase the efficiency of the code and modularity in an effort to make adding new features to the bot easier! There’s no ETA due to the extensive coding that Codeize has to do, but we are hoping to have it as soon as possible!

Last but not least, Q4.. Unfortunately, we did not do much due to busy schedules in the development team. However, we did do our advent calendar which was a success! During December, we created a calendar where drivers could log jobs and get an entry to a giveaway of a Greece DLC, Nitro x 2 and Basic Nitro x 2.

Public Relations Team

2024 was a mixed bag for the Public Relations Team. Both Facebook and X (Twitter) saw much higher follower gains compared to last year, but Instagram saw much lower follower gains.

Instagram received a 16.3% decrease in likes, which is very similar to the decrease we saw last year. However, the big stand out figure this year is our Facebook likes, increasing by a MASSIVE 150%! Thank you to everyone who is interacting with us on our Facebook page!

However, a huge thank you and congratulations to the team, putting out 555 posts throughout the year, a 17% increase!

This year saw the Verified Streamer Programme revamp, including the introduction of YouTube streaming, introduction of email newsletters, and introduction of new posts such as our regular Trivia Tuesday!

Make sure to follow us on X, Instagram, and Facebook for the latest updates!

Examination Team

The Examination Team had a very busy year, seeing more than 750 exams taken throughout the year. Also within this year was the introduction of new routes and types of exams!

3 new routes were introduced, Bern -> Zurich, Zurich -> Milan, and Modesto -> Reno!

2 new types of examination were introduced, including a flatbed examination, and farm machinery examination!

Alongside these additions, working with the Media Team, the badges for all examinations were updated on our DriversHub!

New routes and examination types are always in the works in the team. Stay tuned for what we have coming up this year!

Media Team

What a busy year it has been for the Media Team! Starting off the year, we saw the release of our Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day skins. Following on, we had our St Patrick’s Trailer Skin and Easter Trailer Skin!

On April Fool’s Day, we released a special cargo for our Drivers to haul. If you want to see it for yourself, download the “Prime Logistics Lowbed Cargo” modification from our DriversHub. You won’t be disappointed!

Moving towards the middle of the year, we had our Pride trailer skin release, followed on by the Prostate Cancer Awareness Month trailer skin in September, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month trailer skin in October.

We had several large campaigns held as we moved on to our larger projects for 2024, the first of which we teased with CCTV footage on our Social Media pages! This ended up being the release of the AI Traffic Pack for ATS, meaning AI vehicles will sometimes have Prime branding!

The second of which was all to do with our anniversary. We released our very own Prime HQ Map modification, allowing drivers to drive around and deliver to Prime’s very own headquarters in northern Germany! This was the largest undertaking ever for our Media Team and we are so glad with how it turned out, and are glad that our drivers continue to enjoy it. Alongside this, we released our 6 Year Anniversary trailer, and a new skin for the Mack Pinnacle!

Finishing off the year, we saw the release of our Halloween, Christmas and New Year’s trailer skins!

All the while, our Photography division within the Media Team was producing hundreds of high-quality photos from all of our events. You can see all the photos throughout the year in the #prime-media channel on our Discord Server

Overall, this was an incredibly busy year for the Media Team. We have so many more projects in the works, as seen in our quarterly Newsletters, so please stay tuned for all of these releases!

Conclusion

Thank you for reading our 2024 At A Glance Newsletter, we hope you enjoyed reading the summary from our departments throughout the year.

-Prime Logistics Public Relations Team