Blog

Perhaps Pete Townshend, lead guitarist for The Who, is more of a visionary than many of us might have believed. Townshend’s 1971 hit “Going Mobile” celebrates the power of cutting ties to everyday hassles and heading out on the road. If we didn’t know any better, we might have assumed he worked at a trucking company:

It’s clear: visibility of transportation problems will lead your enterprise to greater insight!

Today, transportation problems arise no matter the type or model of your business. These problems range from shipper-oriented bid requests to complex multi-modal transportation challenges. We each need to be mindful of our transportation landscape to better understand how we can manage our spend. In addition, route tracking software can provide additional visibility into the pains of transportation problems to provide greater understanding of your fleet’s operations.

Are you wondering what activities and behaviors you can perform to improve your business relationship with IT partners?

Staying “in the know” is key to continued success in the transportation services industry. Here are a few front-burner media topics covered during the first half of the year that you may want to further explore:

As cyber criminals get more sophisticated, cybersecurity has evolved to put more walls between them and valuable user data. Leading strategies include encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA) – which takes the traditional username/password approach to digital security and adds authentication factors like thumbprint, face and voice recognition, PIN numbers and trusted device authentication.

Seven-hundred billion: the current dollar value attributed to the American trucking industry, and a figure representing that industry’s significant contribution to the nation’s annual Gross Domestic Product. In the United States, trucks handle approximately 70% of all freight shipments. Considering these numbers, it is not surprising that the US trucking industry is occasionally referred to as the backbone of the national economy.

Like all business enterprises, however, the transportation management industry faces mammoth challenge as evolving market trends compel it to discover methods to reduce operating costs, accelerate revenue growth, enhance customer service and meet hardline corporate objectives. To this end, the industry has slowly come to embrace technology and seek out fleet management solutions. By not keeping pace with the robust technology investments seen in other sectors, the transport management industry is rife with disruption – but solutions for navigating current and future market trends and associated challenges exist.

Companies seeking strategic guidance should look to innovative business intelligence and logistics software options that integrate and optimize services. Among these cutting-edge technologies: Master Data Management (MDM), in which comprehensive data is stored in one secure master file. This single reference point refines information sharing among staff and departments, and helps users make more knowledgeable decisions surrounding rating, planning and expediting.

Communication breakdown

It's always the same

I'm having a nervous breakdown

Drive me insane!

Pong. Does it ping – sorry, ring a bell?

Readers of a certain age probably recall this early 1970s video game: a table tennis match played s-l-o-w-l-y on a non-flat screen television. Despite its simplicity, Pong brought a new kind of entertainment into innumerable households – but would never succeed in the sophisticated 21st-century gaming environment.

Throughout the last decade, the phrase cloud computing — web-centered computing in which services, including apps, and storage and security, are hosted via the Internet — has become standard in the software-industry lexicon. Enterprising organizations are aware of the mounting costs and complexities of maintaining a secure applications environment and are eager for greater freedom to focus on their core business capabilities. Forward-thinking leadership teams are turning to cloud-based trucking software solutions along with hosting services to manage and protect their operations software environment, rather than on relying on internal hard drives.

People on the front lines of transportation companies used to be tethered to workstations in the office, truck, dock and maintenance bay.