Blog

Cutting-edge technology, “Wow” factor demos, class sessions and a former astronaut.

There was never a dull moment at the 2018 in.sight user conference +expo hosted in Houston during third quarter. Customers from all over the US and Canada experienced a convergence of technology designed specifically for the transportation industry.

Front and center in the exhibit hall at the George R. Brown Convention, Trimble Transportation Enterprise (formerly TMW Systems) and Trimble Transportation Mobility (formerly PeopleNet) were on full display with an integrated market identity, solution set and support network.

Carriers could be waiting a while for their electric and CNG tractors to arrive. So what technologies are available now to help minimize companies’ diesel costs and stay competitive?

Where is the economy headed? Will shipper demand remain strong? What is the outlook for freight carriers?

These are burning questions for anyone in the transportation space, given the complex factors influencing today’s economy. A closer look at economic trend analysis provides some answers.

Time is money. That’s why a freight brokerage needs to conduct every part of its operation quickly, efficiently and correctly. Laborious manual processes tie up your staff and eat into your profits. So do errors that people need to go back and correct – essentially performing the same work twice. Also, faulty communications can add hours – or days – to the time it takes to move a customer’s freight, not only incurring extra costs but also, perhaps risking the loss new business from that customer in the future.

Let’s take a look at how to avoid wasted time in three phases of a freight broker’s business – acquiring and keeping customers, matching loads with the right carriers, and monitoring freight in transit.

Shippers who understand the importance of customer satisfaction will scrub entire operations not only to reduce costs but also to seek new ways to deliver greater operational efficiency. Those shippers know by implementing factors like forecasting, real-time tracking and collaboration they can deliver benefits to their bottom lines that are nearly as good as reduced rates.

Newly released figures from the Commerce Department showed the US economy was firing on all cylinders in the second quarter of the year, turning in its strongest performance since 2014.  The gross domestic product, the widest measure of the economy, increased at a 4.1% annual rate in April through June. That’s nearly double the upwardly revised first quarter rate of 2.2% and the third best growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.

Bid season is a massive puzzle. It’s a timed challenge in which you have to make the right moves with the right players in the hopes that you put together a profitable arrangement for the year to come. So how do you put together a winning year of business? Here are three key ideas to keep you headed toward bid success.

 There’s nothing new about a shipper detaining drivers, making them wait to load. It’s a decades-old struggle between shipper and carrier with drivers stuck in the middle.

So why raise it in the 21st Century? Technology in the form of electronic logging devices (ELDs) could give drivers and fleets a new way to combat the ongoing fight to reduce detention times and one day, even eliminate the time drivers wait—and wait.

Is your business still going through the fleet maintenance process manually?  Entering a work order, scheduling the job, getting the truck in the shop, searching for parts in the warehouse, writing the bill out by hand and entering the information into a database? Or, is your current maintenance solution just not getting the job done?

Like the petroleum industry, fleet management systems have upstream, midstream and downstream components working to transform crude data into information that fuels business.