We are now well past the 1st April enforcement date for electronic logging device (ELD) implementation. Now if your trucks are stopped for a roadside inspection, how do you prepare to get through that without any violations? Here’s what you need to know to be violation free.

With technology, innovation is always around the corner. Some more than others. We have all seen the hikes in interest and following for tech innovations to have them fizzle out. We are at the start of such an upswing. Take a step further back, and you will get to the topic, Blockchain.

The World Bank has said logistical costs swallow up around a quarter of Indonesia’s gross domestic product, citing bottlenecks in supply chains, long dwelling times in ports and lengthy trade clearances. Indonesia’s e-commerce sales are set to rise from 3 percent of retail activity now to 19 percent by 2027, Morgan Stanley estimates.

Technology has enabled us to record, plan, allocate, dispatch, track, validate, and analyze all freight movement from a single dashboard with clear and real-time actionable insights in an easy-to-understand format. This leads to an agile, reactive, and dynamic setup for a company’s transportation management system.

Under-utilized capacity carries a clear cost which adds to the cost-per-unit carried by the resource. It isn’t feasible to run under-utilized resources to fulfill the ever-increasing demand created due to expectations of on-demand, same, or next day deliveries. On-demand and preferred slot delivery (or pick-up) is made more efficient with the use of an auto-allocation engine.

Traditional trade occupies close to 90% in key developing markets. By leveraging cloud-based technology, last mile delivery can be optimized for such distribution networks, bringing in organized patterns within the industry and generate more value for all the stakeholders involved namely the retailers, the distributors, the manufacturers, and the end-customers.

We recently integrated with Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Siri. Now, the manager can simply relax and instruct their personal assistant to fetch the information for them. Almost anyone can use the personal assistant without any hassle. It doesn’t matter if they are tech-savvy.

We saw last mile delivery being used as the key input in all omnichannel strategies. We saw localization in distribution strategies centered around making last mile delivery more effective. We also saw machine learning being implemented successfully in logistics and field workforce planning. These trends would be the greatest influencers in 2018 for logistics and field workforce management.

Here we are in conversation with Mr. Alok Gautam, the Country Logistics Leader at Dow Chemicals. He is an industry veteran with more than two decades of experience in the Chemicals and Oil & Gas industry. He is celebrated as a change maker and a man of keen intellect driving transformations across the industry.

It is time our industry stopped chasing Uberization and created an Airbnb model. In trucking, Uberization is still transactional brokerage. There are key differences in the personal transport versus the freight market. What we need is a pay-per-day model that allows for short-term dedicated capacity, rather than long term dedicated contracts.