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Fuel prices fluctuate. Parts wear down, break over time and need to be replaced. Those are two constant operating costs that every fleet has to manage.

In a speech addressing Congress on May 8, Douglas Maughan urged the US to lead the way on blockchain development by calling it the “technology of the future.” As the Division Director of Science and Technology for the US Department of Homeland Security, Maughan met with the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to highlight the benefits of blockchain in business applications--particularly in shipping, logistics and customs--with an emphasis on supply chain management.

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

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 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?

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.

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Blockchain technology is expected to have a tremendous impact on the transportation industry. To understand its basics and potential, begin with Timothy Leonard’s expansive white paper, “Blockchain for Transportation: Where the Future Starts,” then check out our blog post Blockchain Technology: The 21st Century Link For Profit and Growth and pre-recorded webinar. For further help in learning the language of blockchain, we’ve compiled an A-to-Z glossary from multiple sources defining the most common terms related to Blockchain.

Think of blockchain as a high-tech, shared digital ledger spread across all of a business’s components and partnerships.