Know where your drivers are at all times. A trucker was lost in snow-covered woods in Oregon for four days when the wrong address was plugged into the GPS. He managed to survive and walk back to more populated areas when his truck got stuck on small roads.
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.
Polar Vortex can disrupt logistics movement pushing up freight rates due to a shortage of trucks and drivers. Shipments may be delayed either due to rerouting away from snow-blocked highways or, being detained due to traffic bottlenecks. Multi-modal transport via railroads and ports are also affected.
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.
The U.S. government shut down at midnight on Friday, 19th January, 2018, after Democrats and Republicans, locked in a bitter dispute over immigration and border security, failed to agree on a last-minute deal to fund its operations. Democratic leaders wanted to include protections from deportation for about 700,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.
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.
Reduce your logistics management costs and increase overall efficiency by tracking drivers and their behavior in real-time. Industries, especially those with sensitive cargo and shipments, focus on tracking the behavior of their drivers to ensure service level agreement (SLA) compliance.
The Phase 2 (Mandatory Implementation) of ELDs began on the 18th of Dec 2017. US Department of Transport is mandating that drivers be on duty for a fixed set of hours (60 hours in 7 days, or 70 hours in 8 days; based on the breaks taken in between). There are multiple constraints was total hours of driving.
We now stand at the forefront of the optimization revolution. Never has sweeping transformational changes benefited multiple industries more than right now. GST holds up the promise of total realignment and restructuring of how logistics movement happens across the nation. There would some resistance from some companies, as many are set in the way they have been doing things over a period and are averse to any sudden change.
Technology can be the springboard for your resource planning. You can use schedule planning and routing software to automate logistics movement in your company. Such solutions have the potential to bring down logistics and transportation costs, whether owned or leased. Efficient fleet management can boost your resource utilization, productivity, and profitability.
