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With a little more than 18 months left in the decade, what are the main concerns for the trucking industry before we reach 2020? Three association leaders representing the Iowa Motor Truck Association, Toronto Transportation Club and the Women In Trucking Association informally shared their observations on the hot topics being discussed among their membership and what’s keeping them up at night.

Just how much freight do 3PLs or brokers move for tens of thousands of shippers every day? Here’s an interesting fact: The $166 billion third-party logistics industry is 1.5 times the size of the beer market and four times larger than the market for candy.

Leveraging data to boost process efficiencies of supply-chain logistics or to shorten delivery times—or both—is becoming more difficult with every terabyte of data shippers and receivers store. 

“What the internet did for communications, blockchain will do for trusted transactions.” - Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM

Maybe your company employs a team of brokers to secure transportation after filling out order forms. 

Leading brokerages are using technology to achieve the ideal balance between personalized service and more aggressive growth.

Nothing in business is certain, especially in one as highly competitive as transportation and logistics. To stay viable, companies must continuously adapt and keep technology current to meet new challenges and opportunities head on.

In 2018 and beyond there will be plenty of both. Here are a few emerging technologies and trends that will likely become part of your playbook during the next year or two. 

Transportation brokerage is all about relationships—and that means it’s also about communications. To match loads with the right capacity and make sure all the details of a shipment go well, you must find out as much as you can about the needs of both your shippers and your carriers.

No matter your fleet size, if you have a fleet, you need to maintain that fleet. The results of not doing so can be catastrophic – units taken out of service, safety violations, and drivers and customers angered by loads that can’t be delivered. On the flip side, maintaining a fleet, regardless if you have an in house shop or you use a vendor for your work, promises a fleet that is ready to serve your company and your customers when you need it.

Ten years ago, the iPhone took nearly 200 years of technological progress in communication and put it the palm of your hand. Apple essentially boiled down the history of electric machines used for communication that began with the telegraph and evolved into the internet, and reduced to a small, sleek gadget that one could operate with a fingertip. Ten years later, the smartphone is probably the most widely-used communication object on the globe, but one day, and it will be sooner than you think, we’ll view smartphones in the same way we now think of fax machines and car phones, which seemed fairly revolutionary in the 1980s.