About to renew your logistics business mobile contract?

If you run a fleet of Trucks, this might be an important moment for a reason you weren’t expecting.

Many of Truckcom’s customers use smartphones to run our system which are provided at no initial cost as part of a contract with their mobile provider. It’s a great way to start tapping in to the benefits of using a system like Truckcom without spending anything up-front on either hardware or software.

The great thing about the point of renewal in your contract with your mobile network is the power it gives you as a customer. If they aren’t prepared to offer you free devices (or at least very heavily subsidised ones) to keep your business, you are free to go to another network – and they know it.

We are always pleased to advise on which devices are compatible with Truckcom – and the good news is that smartphones of various types and flavours are all the rage – they’re getting far more common, and far easier to get hold of.

How much can IT really do for a logistics business?

IT has had a rough ride over the years. A lot of people don’t really trust it to deliver – and a lot of technology companies have done, frankly, quite a poor job of implementing it in the real world in the past.  Although a big IT disaster isn’t in the news right now, they’re a perennial problem – do you remember the furore quite recently about NHS IT systems, for instance?

But you could argue that right now, we’re entering a golden age of IT finally delivering what it promised all those years ago. Computers are cheap. Smartphones are fashionable and capable. And there is so, so much that can be done now that couldn’t really be done economically just a few years ago.  A lot of companies really are using IT in a highly effective (and competitive) way. And a lot of people can now testify that small IT companies can often do a massively better job than large ones.

Truckcom has benefited a lot from these factors. We’re a small company that has put together a very capable software package that does a lot of very useful things – for a variety of different types of transport and logistics operators. Does it make a big difference to their businesses? Well, yes, it definitely does (have a look at some of our case studies). Could it do more? Well, we have to admit that maybe it could.

So you want it to make the tea, too?

Trust me, Truckcom already does lots. It deals with the whole information chain, from customer order, through to the vehicle and driver, and then all the way back to the customer getting their PODs and invoices. And of course vehicle tracking and satnav, roadworthiness checks, the list goes on.  And all this in the real world of logistics, dealing with MDs, truck drivers, traffic planners, and plenty of hard-bitten transport professionals who didn’t really believe, to start with, that any of this stuff would really help them.

But there’s one last thing that Truckcom hasn’t previously done – the actual traffic and route planning itself. We have done pretty everything else, but automatic planning and routing had never made it up the priority list in the past. The bit I mean is getting the software to advise which vehicle should do which job – and crucially, to advise on re-planning on the occasions when things go wrong for any reason.

The really hard bit

Automatic planning and routing in logistics operations is a computationally hard problem.  It’s only when someone tells you that there can be more than 3 million ways of assigning 10 jobs to 10 vehicles that you start to pause for thought. But this is a problem that has  been solved by some other providers, so undaunted, we thought – “why not?”.

The result is an experimental planning module that is starting to generate some amazing results. Getting more jobs onto the vehicles than the tradional methods can; achieving better on-time performance than the traditional methods can; and doing all this at the touch of a button.

Anyone for chess?

In the world of computing, there’s a phrase for this kind of thing – “Artificial Intelligence”, or AI for short. AI covers a range of what IT people call “search problems” – how to find the best solution from a large number of possible answers.

The best analogy for what our automatic planning module is doing is probably chess playing. A good chess player looks many moves ahead in a chess game. They then choose the best sequence of moves and make the first one. They then repeat the whole process. The “tree” of possibilities (“from this first move, there are 27 possible second moves – or from that first move, there are 23″ and so on) can get very large, so a good chess player doesn’t look at every theoretically possible sequence of moves – they get good at spotting the sequences that are likely to lead to a good result and only analyse those.

Truckcom, with it’s experimental automatic planning module, is behaving very like this. There are the same kind of trees of possibilities (if a vehicle does this job first, then these are the jobs it could potentially do next); there are similar value judgements (this set of jobs is better for the vehicle than that set – maybe better on time performance, maybe less idle time, etc.); and there is the same requirement not to look at absolutely every possible combination of jobs because it would take a lifetime to do.

But the very best thing about this approach as applied by Truckcom is the link to the mobile devices. We know, from features that have been in Truckcom for years,

• where the vehicles are
• which jobs are completed and which are in progress
• which vehicles are at risk of running late for their current job

If you feed this information back into the automatic planning process, the power of the resulting system is, frankly, breathtaking. You finally have an automatic traffic planning system that can respond to events and deal with issues. So, like other parts of Truckcom, its not just a theoretical benefit – it’s a practical, real world system that can transform a the way a logistics business operates.

I guess this blog post is a bit of a teaser, because this module isn’t yet fully operational. It’s currently being tested by one of our larger customers. The good news is that the tests are already telling us that this form of planning can out-perform the previous manual traffic plans – and at a tiny, tiny fraction of the effort.  Watch this space…..

Satellite Navigation on mobile devices

I guess for us the idea of putting Satnav on a mobile device is the most natural thing in the world. Truckcom has offered Satnav as part of our solution ever since we first started in 2004 - and most of our customers use this part of the system.

But recently the takeup of this option has reduced – and it’s a fair guess that this is due to the very widespread use of stand-alone satellite navigation systems like the TomTom One.  Back in 2004, hardly anyone had their own Satnav. But now, they’re very widespread, and there’s a good chance your mum now has one (or even your granny). As a result, most professional drivers (and a large fraction of HGV drivers) now have their own standalone satnav – and this makes the benefit of having a satnav solution as part of Truckcom less important for our buyers.

However, it’s interesting to try to predict what may happen with Satnavs in the future. Back in 2004, TomTom (one of the very first big satnav companies) was focussed on providing mobile device based satnavs and was actually doing this before it produced its GO and ONE products. But as they grew, it made sense for them focus their mass market offerings on standalone satnavs because the smartphone market at that time was in it’s infancy.

But now, specially if you look at CoPilot (our preferred supplier for Truckcom’s integrated Satnav at present), you can see a lot of appeal in the mobile device based offer. CoPilot is now available on Windows Phones, on Google Android phones, and of course on the ubiquitous iPhone. Maybe as we progress through this decade, we’ll see the standalone satnav die out, and people using satnav more and more on the same device they use as their phone, and to access the mobile internet.

If this does happen, it will make our decisions back in 2004 look slightly ahead of their time – but hey, things will come right in the end!

Power really is nothing without control

A bit cheesy, I acknowledge (apologies to a leading tyre manufacturer you may be aware of….) – but it’s an important point.

Modern HGVs are immensely powerful machines. They exude power in many ways – everything is “heavy duty” – and for enthusiasts, that’s part of the attraction. If you run a fleet of trucks, or if your involved in managing or using these vehicles, you can’t help but be impressed by the sheer scale of the engineering involved. Of course, many of us have had our senses dulled by familiarity (you see a lot of HGVs on modern roads) so we take them slightly for granted. But next time you see one, close up, just pause for thought. Think of the weight of the thing – often more than 30 tonnes – thats the weight of a crowd of maybe 300 people.  And think of the power involved, in horse-power terms – and then realise that you’re thinking about  a herd of  more than 500 horses!  Many of these machines have the sort of levels of horse-power that would make Jeremy Clarkson twitter with excitement – but it’s all delivered in an understated way, and most people never even stop to consider it.

But what about the “control” part? How much control does the team of people responsible for managing the fleet actually have over them? -  and crucially, how do they exert that control?

That’s where we come in. Truckcom is a smartphone based fleet management system, and it’s amazing how much you can now do with smartphone technology.

 

Tracking

Control starts from measurement. “You can’t control what you can’t measure”. So unless you know where the vehicle is, you’ve got no chance of controlling it properly. Just about everyone in the fleet management business understands this these days, and vehicle tracking systems are quite popular these days (although intriguingly in the UK about half fleet operators don’t yet use them). With a smartphone system like Truckcom, you’re actually tracking the phones – but this is perfectly accurate, and actually very flexible – if you have a hire vehicle for a day, you can still track it.

Proof of Delivery

With smartphones, your driver can get a customer on-screen signature there and then from the customer and this can be made available to anyone else who needs to see the confirmation within minutes. If you don’t use this sort of system and you’re relying on a paper-chase to try to retrieve the paper POD, then you’re not able to control things as much as another operator who does have an instant electronic POD system in place.

Roadworthiness checks

How much control do you have over whether drivers record their daily vehicle checks? With Truckcom you can make sure that they record the checks before they start their work that day – and you then have a permanent electronic record of the checks, proved to be acceptable to VOSA. Again, if you’re relying on paper records, which you may not get back from the driver for many days (and sometimes not at all!) you’re not able to exert as much control over this process as you might like to.

And more…

Truckcom has a lot of other benefits too – like Satnav, reporting, web access. Everything we do is based on trying to maximise control of your fleet.

Who would you buy a fleet management system from?

Good question. Let’s have a quick look at the different types of companies that might want to sell you one in the UK:

1. The resellers. Classic example is NavMan, which started out as a New Zealand company which was then taken over by a company in the states. If you buy a Navman system in the UK, you’re dealing with a reseller. The reseller may know quite a lot about the product, but they’re not in control of it, and theres plenty they may not know. Also, there are more mouths to feed on the supply side of this arrangement – Navman has to make money, and the reseller needs to make money.

2. The larger players. There are several who operate in the UK - companies like Quartix and Minor Planet . But consider the balance of power in your relationship with a company like this. If you, as a small or medium sized company, are doing business with a large company, then how much of their attention will you get? How much will they care about how happy you are?

3. And of course last but definitely not least, you could use one of the smaller suppliers. This is where we, Truckcom, sit, so you can tell where I’m going with this, right? Smaller suppliers are likely to be more hungry for your business. They’re on the way up, so they go the extra mile to make sure you’re happy, so they can use you as a good reference story. And a small supplier is very different from a reseller. In our case, all of Truckcom’s technology has been developed in this country, for users in this country, over the last few years. All the people who developed it are still working at Truckcom – so there is no question that can’t be answered on how it works, how to use it, how it can be changed, or anything else.

So of course, I’m suggesting that consider the smaller suppliers, and in particular us . And if you make sure you don’t pay anything up front, but go with a regular monthly subscription, then you can minimise any commercial risk too this way.

A final thought – there’s another angle to who to buy off. The title of this blog entry was originally going to have been “Wear a tie?” but this wasn’t a very good title for the search engines to find us with – so I didn’t use it in the end. But it’s an interesting point. At Truckcom, we’re actually a spin-off from a small haulage operation. We realised from the start that what logistics operators want to see is someone who understands their operation and can speak their language – and they don’t care much what they look like. So you can rely on anyone turning up to demonstrate Truckcom to you not looking too smart…..

Ruggedised devices or phones? It’s your choice

So if you want to use a system like Truckcom, should you use ruggedised, industrial devices  or the cheaper “phone” grade devices?

The best answer we can come up with is this: Use whichever you’re most comfortable with. Truckcom is fully compatible with both kinds of device; so really the choice of which sort to use (and therefore how much you spend on devices) is very much a financial decision for you – after all, they will be your devices.

Ruggedised devices represent a larger investment (they are substantially more expensive than smartphones) but can be expected to last longer. There are rumours of ruggedised devices in service with some of the parcel carriers which have lasted 8 or 9 years. Smartphones almost certainly won’t last that long, but can be expected to last about 3 years. Often if phone devices have been provided to you by one of the networks as part of a contract with them, they’ll expect to replace them at that stage anyway.

Among our customers to date, economy seems to be the main factor governing which devices they use, and smartphones are a firm favourite. Given the price differential with ruggedised devices, you’d need to lose or break several smartphones before your out of pocket compared with ruggedised device costs, and in practice the smartphone devices do the job just fine at a far lower cost. But I have to come back to the previous answer as the bottom line – this is a customer choice, and we recommend you use whichever style of device you’re most comfortable with.

A final factor in device choice is the exact use you intend it for. Some operators need to be able to scan barcodes out on the road. If you need this, you will need a ruggedised style device, because none of the smartphone grade devices include barcode readers.

What’s your experience in use of different kinds of devices in practice? We’re interested in your comments.

A day in the life of Truckcom

So what happens on a typical day at Truckcom?

I guess like a lot of small businesses there’s a wide range of different things going on at any one time. Here’s a list of things on the boil here at the moment:

- First full working day on the new website!  We’re still finishing the “get an instant quote” bit (that sends a message straight back to the prospect).  We’re going to be stepping up our adwords campaign later this week, it’ll be interesting to see how things settle in once we get a few more visitors. Have you had a look yet? If not, please do, we’re interested in your comments.

- Social media marketing.  Lots of stuff going on in LinkedIn and Twitter. Hugh’s profile on LinkedIn is starting to get several relevant connections now. Too early to say how much use Twitter is going to be, but easy enough to try so why not?

- Putting the finishing touches on our new “web-only” access module for Vehicle Checks. We have a new customer who will only be using Truckcom for vehicle checks, so we’re doing this to give them a very lightweight way to use the office end of the system

-  Better power management for Truckcom mobile: we’re working on power management tweaks in Truckcom mobile to allow it to carry on working in the background with the device screen turned off. This should help make sure the devices work well during long site visits where the charger may be disconnected for a few hours.

- Tweaks to the customer job entry process.  One of our customers using this is starting a rollout to more of their customers so we’re doing a few tweaks to make it as easy as possible for the customers themselves (and the depot staff who then manage the deliveries) to use the system.

What do you think of our new website?

We’re very interested to know what you think about our new website. We’re hoping the new site will be of interest to our potential customers and current customers, and that this blog will allow us to get to know you all a little better.

We’re interested in two kinds of feedback, I guess. The first is just about the site. What do you think of the visual design? Does the site have the right content? Is it persuasive? How could it be improved?

The second kind of feedback is more about the product. If this is the first time you’ve come across Truckcom, what do you think of it? Some people “get” Truckcom straight away – and many of them are now our customers. But some people immediately think about problems they might encounter using a system like this, and if you’re in that camp, we are very interested to hear from you. We may well have things to learn from you that could help us to improve Truckcom – and you never know, we may have a useful discussion which ends up changing your views.

Customer Self Service Websites for Hauliers

We’re doing some interesting work with some of our haulier customers at the moment to maximise the potential for their customer websites. These are the websites that their haulage customers go to for various things:

- Checking job Proof of Delivery online (both Electronic and scanned paper PODs)

- Checking vehicle progress online

 The addition we’ve just made is General Haulage job entry. We’ve found that by looking at what the pallet networks do, we can provide a really comprehensive facility for a haulier’s customers to enter and manage their freight collections online. Of course they can enter the jobs in a web page, this is the basic requirement – but they can do a lot of other things too:

The system remembers addresses so they never need to rekey the same address. They can even re-use whole job templates (collection and delivery, and the type of service, maybe economy or next day) at the click of a button. They can even bulk-load lots of existing addresses into the website to make it even easier to enter new jobs

Label printing. Once they’ve entered the consignments, they can print labels directly from the website on a suitable label printer and attach these to the consignment straight away. The labels are barcoded so then the freight can be tracked (using Truckcom of course) through the haulier’s depots through to final delivery

Delivery note printing. The customer can print their own delivery notes, with details of the consignment and their own branding at the top, straight away at the point of job booking. This is the natural time to do it, and it means if part of the onward delivery doesn’t use a Truckcom PDA for some reason you’ve got a paperwork backup

Collection manifests. Another little touch that helps the practical process of managing freight movements. When the haulier’s driver turns up to collect the consignments, the customer gets him to sign a collection manifest so they have proof of collection. Yes, of course these are paper records which is a bit tiresome, but if the customer wants this extra piece of paperwork the website is very helpful to them in making it easy to do it.

 We’ve also found some interesting ways of building vehicle tracking data from other sources into these websites. If our customer is using another provider to do “black-box” tracking, it turns out that in a lot of cases, we can still build vehicle tracking data into our website – even if no Truckcom PDA/smartphone is involved. The PDA/smartphone approach is the best one overall, because you can get so much more information from it (which job is currently in progress; late advices; and of course Electronic POD), but if a customer only has a black box tracking device in the vehicle, we can still use that to present the vehicle position on the customer website if they want this to be done.

 As so often turns out to be the case, technically, pretty much anything you need can be done with Truckcom. What would you like?

Automatic job input – saves you time and avoids errors

One of the things that Truckcom started to do quite early in its life was to connect to other systems and Receive Job Data from them. When we started, we weren’t sure how important this was – but we quickly found out.

One of our biggest (and earliest) customers already had a job management system before they became interested in Truckcom. Their job management system did a load of stuff, including the initial booking process of each movement and billing processes for the customer and the contractor doing the job. However, this system didn’t really help them at all in managing their vehicles (tracking them, knowing when the jobs were completed, etc.). This is where Truckcom came in. What Truckcom is all about is Trucks and Communication.

So they signed up for Truckcom. They kept their legacy system and kept it doing pretty much all the things it was doing – but they “grafted” Truckcom on to it so they got vehicle tracking, customer vehicle/job tracking, late advices direct from the vehicles when required, and electronic POD. These features filled gaps in their previous approach to managing their work and their fleet – so they got the best of all worlds.

The great thing about this approach is how easy it is to do. The geekery involved in connecting systems can be quite involved, but we’ve made an art of it now, and Truckcom now has more interfaces on it than you can shake a stick at. And once you have the automatic transfers of jobs from another system into Truckcom running, the process of introducing Truckcom into your business becomes really easy. All of a sudden, you just “have” electronic POD whereas previously you didn’t – and you can track the vehicles, track the jobs, and provide both these facilities to your customers via the web – while keeping your old, familiar business processes around the old system if you want to.

We’ve done this with a few other customers since, and we’re actually in the process of rolling out two more right now. And none of these customers is Paying Up Front for this facility – we do it for them free of charge to win their trust, and win their licence fees.  And gradually, people who are looking for solutions to their fleet management headaches are realising that there are some really good answers out there to many of their problems – and hopefully we’re doing our bit in this.

The other way Truckcom uses automatic job input is for customers to enter jobs directly into Truckcom (via the web), or to provide spreadsheets with job details in which can then be quickly used for bulk entry. Some of our current customers achieve more than 70% automatic job input this way. And you can see the effect it’s had on their business. Previously a lot of attention was tied up in bashing the jobs into their old system. Now, most of that just happens automatically, in the background – so more time is available to focus on running their operation efficiently  for the benefit of their customers.

So automation is good. The more you can automate your business processes, within reason, the better.