As the amount of technology involved with every interaction in the supply chain continues to increase, the need for the convergence of all of the data into a useful tool for road transport businesses becomes even more important. This is the smart way for trucking businesses for the future.
You do not need to be a tech freak or a computer genius anymore to get the best out of technology. The most important aspect to the issue is to distill down data, flowing through multiple systems, to the information needed to run whatever you are doing safely and efficiently.
The latest developments in the kind of electronics used on board trucks, in warehouses, in scheduling, in delivery and receival, in invoicing, in compliance, in HR and maintenance, are creating massive data flows in and around the freight being transported.
Not only are individual consignments tracked every step of the way, but the behaviour of the driver and other road users is also included in the data stream. The consignor can watch goods make their way to the required destination, receiving alerts at important check points simply by looking at a dashboard of all their activity.
The industry is moving away from systems that comprise of individual or separate technologies. The days are going to pass, where a truck has a GPS tracker, which appears on one screen in the scheduling office, while another person in another office will invoice for the work done after a message is sent to them on completion, and the maintenance department will phone scheduling to find out when a truck is going to be available for servicing.
There is now enough data flowing in and out of the truck cabin, the scheduling office, accounts, the consignor and consignees systems and much, much more, for the issue for all of these technologies to be about interpreting data and using it to oil the wheels of every procedure in the supply chain.
We may soon have all of the black boxes, distraction monitoring, freight tracking and customer information that we need. The newer, forward-looking systems also include machine vision and artificial intelligence capabilities. What we are looking for now is for the convergence of all of the data from these technologies. Convergence that will provide long -term efficiency savings and safety improvements that make the investment worthwhile.
As more and more of this technology comes on board, operators will need to start thinking in terms of change management. Essentially, this is utilising the data to drive business decisions.
“The question needs to be raised, what are you doing with that data?” says Craig Forbes, Driverisk CEO. “That data needs to be wrapped and stacked, based on a critical occurrence, based on all of the information that you are getting from all of these data sources. Apart from pointing out what is going on now, these sorts of systems should be able to start to identify ongoing issues and ask the question as to what is being done around these issues.”
These kinds of considerations are particularly poignant when dealing with data around safety systems, both within the cabin and in loading and unloading situations. Businesses are looking for transparency about the way they handle these kind of problems, especially when thinking about this through the prism of chain of responsibility legislation and obligations.
As the convergence of all of the data from the latest technology increases, the way of collecting all of the data streams will probably change. Over the longer term, current technology that is being procured and installed as a separate solution will likely become a plug-in within an overall data-processing system used throughout the business and supply chain.
