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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.

Transportation has yet to experience any major transformation from Blockchain, yet certain blueprints and ideas keep flowing from published articles. There seems to be no end in sight for the changing price of a Bitcoin, and new cryptocurrencies seemingly emerge every month. Is there a permanent home for cryptocurrency and its underlying Blockchain technology in Transportation?

There is much reason for the trucking industry to be optimistic as we enter 2018. For one, freight levels have improved significantly for the industry. In addition, the combination of better freight volumes and for-hire fleets not adding to truck counts in 2017 absorbed much of the excess capacity that plagued the industry over the previous couple of years. With both the main drivers of truck freight demand doing well and the use of electronic logging devices now required, 2018 could be the best year the industry has experienced in the post deregulation era. Indeed, two of the biggest challenges for motor carriers this year will be finding enough qualified drivers and covering all their loads.

Private trucking fleets represent roughly one-half of the overall trucking market. According to FleetSeek, a trucking industry research firm, the total truck fleet count in the United States is 565,253. Some 277,623 of these are private fleets, or slightly more than 49%. The great majority are very small with twenty vehicles or less: 189,849 fleets have 1-5 vehicles; 39,509 have 6-10 vehicles, and 24,465 have 11-20 vehicles.

When Blockchain was introduced to me by Timothy Leonard, CTO at TMW Systems, I immediately thought of a Lego set tucked away in my son’s closet. As I listened and researched, I quickly learned that my initial analogy helped my financial mind understand a very complex technical concept.

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.

We’re a mobile society. As we approach the end of this decade, mobility means no longer being tethered to a desk. From the dock to the coffee shop or at a truck stop, trucking mobile apps are changing the ways of our workforce.

Suppose your vehicle is not operating at peak performance. Naturally, you would start looking under the hood, but due to the complexity of modern engines the cause will not likely be visible.

Maintaining your fleet has never been more important than now. Not solely because most Class 8 commercial trucks are teenagers; but overall safety and the ability to keep assets moving are critical for business success.

TMW had the fortune of publishing observations from ten important guest bloggers. Each has expertise in areas that matter to the transportation industry. Each brought new or differing perspectives to our readers. Did you miss one? Take a closer look at the key topics, which include technology and its role in: Capacity, Driver Shortage/Recruitment, Network Analysis, Customer Satisfaction, Cash Flow and more. Read one, some or all for wide-reaching views telling more of what’s going on around us.