WENDY Leavitt, director of editorial and market development for Fleet Owner magazine, compares the fleet industry to fly-fishing in a pristine stream full of trout.
“We all know the fish are out there,” she said. “But it's going to require that you do the right thing and do it pretty darn well if you're going to smell the trout cooking in butter at dinner time.”
In “How Information Technology and Wireless Communications are Changing Truck Fleets,” she laid out a three-pronged plan to accomplish that:
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Become students of your customers and of the industry so you have a base of knowledge.
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Start thinking of yourself as a paid consultant, an expert and a problem solver.
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Take a look at all the assets under your roof, including things you didn't think were your “products” — your expertise, employees, knowledge information, and research — and ask yourself, “Could this be useful to my customers? What if they had it?
“You might find that you have new products, new opportunities, and new ways to add value that you didn't even know you had,” she said.
Her co-presenter, Fleet Owner editor-in-chief Jim Mele, said that advances in technology over the past 10 years mean that fleet customers are making new demands.
“You're being pushed to the limit of services, whether it's multi-compartment bodies or mounting stations for onboard computers,” he said. “If you don't deliver them, they're going to go elsewhere.
“You also have the opportunity to make higher-volume sales to those customers. If you've been used to installing, say, a cell-phone cradle, maybe you can offer that guy a cradle that includes a GPS receiver, so he can implement tracking. Maybe you can supply him with that tracking software or that tracking system. Maybe you can become a reseller. For example, trailer tracking — self-powered systems mounted in trailers. Somebody's got to install those. Why couldn't it be you? Why shouldn't it be you? You have the expertise and customer base to do that.
“Many of the companies entering the business from the Information Technology and wireless side know very little about the truck industry. They're actually looking for resellers and knowledgeable partners to get them into that market. You people are perfectly positioned to be those resellers for them.”
Mele said people have this image of the trucking industry as being “a very old, staid, and conservative business,” when in fact it has become a “true, leading-edge industry” over the past 10 years in an attempt to respond to customer needs. He said a survey showed that the service they valued the most was shipment traffic; the last priority was price.
He said that when wireless communications were integrated into the operations, they changed not only the way companies did business, but also their productivity in a dramatic fashion.
Out with the Old
Gone are the days when a dispatch office was dark, and noisy, with a constantly ringing phone and a corkboard full of messages from a driver's family or ones listing equipment shortages, all-night garages, routes, loads, and problems.
Now, the dispatcher isn't a dispatcher. He or she is a fleet manager who sits in front of a computer and uses software programs to manage fleets in a dynamic way. DAT Services, the largest Internet freight-matching service, has 17,000 shipper/carrier customers and does 56,000 Internet sessions in a single day.
Gone are the days when one person — the dispatcher — held all the knowledge of the operation in his or her head, when the driver would call from a pay phone to set the schedule or leave messages from one of the customer stops.
Now, even if fleets determine that cell phones are too expensive to issue to every driver, they take advantage of voice services. Nextel's two-way paging system has become extremely popular, offering optimal coverage and connections.
Gone are the days when offices were clogged with paperwork — bill of lading/proof of delivery, work orders, invoices, special permits, exception reports — that required huge chunks of time to reconcile numbers, act on them, file them, and then find them again.
Now, document imaging provides a way to take paper, scan it, and turn it into an electronic document. The biggest step to a paperless world is XML (Extended Market Language), which means data can be entered once and then used in any fashion. For example, it can be entered using a bar code and used in spreadsheets or reports.
Gone are the days when field service allowed only a best-guess estimate of how much time it would take a technician to reach the location to perform a job.
Now, field service has become customer service. Technicians aren't there simply to fix a problem. They're there as a company representative empowered to handle all issues. GPS is used to determine exactly where all the vehicles are at any time, allowing scheduling on the fly. Technicians have laptops with wireless links, giving them access to all technical data: parts lists, technical documents, ultra-diagnostics, and inventories.
Gone are the days when wholesale/retail distribution went through fixed channels in a rigid structure, with everybody occupying a well-defined role and everything kept close to the chest.
Now, e-commerce has created a dynamic distribution environment, with focus on information and service, collaboration, shared systems, and optimized productivity.