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?

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.
Read more

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 they’re plenty they don’t 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. A good example of one of these is Quartix, who claim to be the largest vehicle tracking supplier in the UK – and I’ve no reason to disbelieve this. 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 Quartix who are 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 telling you to 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 was a bit of a rubbish title for the search engines – 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 sell you Truckcom not looking too smart.

One of the first important questions for a business making a purchase – “how much is it?” – is quickly followed by another for any kind of service offer – “how do I pay?”.

Going back a bit in the Fleet Tracking industry the mainstream answer to the second question was lease finance. The customer signed a lease agreement and paid in regular installments. The Tracking company the bought and installed the hardware using cash up-front obtained from the lease company. However, these arrangements could have a very nasty sting in the tail if the supplier went under, as a few have recently (remember DBS/GlobalLive?). The customer would be saddled with a lease, but no service – because the lease company was still alive and demanding payment, but the tracking supplier had got into problems. Read more

A lot of fleet tracking companies sell their products on the basis that they’ll save money. Of course, vehicle tracking does save you money – but is this the main justification for them? In many people’s eyes, it is part of the justification but not the primary one.

Really, when you boil it down to the essentials, vehicle tracking is about control. Controlling your vehicles, controlling your drivers, controlling your work. You can’t control something that you can’t see, so fleet tracking is a good starting point to give you the visibility you need. But once you’ve got that, the money savings don’t happen on their own – you need to use it effectively to get the most out of it. Read more

In dealings with software suppliers, you’ll quite often come across the “Charge for Change” mentality. It makes a certain sort of sense. If the software they have isn’t quite what you need – then no problem, they can change it, and they’ll charge you for the changes. They might do this on a daily rate, or on a quoted cost for each change.

Even though it makes some sense, you find that there are a lot of problems with this kind of arrangement. One of the main ones is on the supplier’s side. Software costs are notoriously difficult to estimate, so they may well be undercharging (or more likely overcharging) you. But the most important problem affects you, the user. If  a software supplier charges for each change, then financial pressures will tend to make the software change less and less over time. We’ve found that in working arrangements where “Charge for Change” has become the well established way of doing business, actually, there’s hardly any change, and there’s hardly any charge. It stabilises everything, so you get a software product which is fixed and unchangeable (because users can’t afford to change it). Read more

When we designed Truckcom, several years ago, it was an interesting idea to just use the mobile devices as the heart of the system. The people we were competing against then (and almost as much now) were doing something very different – they were bolting a black box into each vehicle and then tracking that. Read more

Why indeed? If you walk into some traffic offices, you’ll see a whiteboard on the wall which shows each vehicle they operate, along with the work it’s doing today – and you’ll see some hardworking people yelling down telephones – and you’ll hear a ringing telephone in the background. When you get a chance to talk to someone, they’ll say they don’t need a Tracking system, thanks. They’re just fine doing it the way they’ve always done it – and they’ve heard some horror stories about tracking suppliers.

The way to really appreciate the difference one of these systems makes to an operation is to walk into the offices of an operator who is using one. No ringing phone in the background – actually, eerily quiet. And then you look at the operators – they don’t have telephones clutched to their ears. Maybe one of them is on the ‘phone, but the rest are working at their screens. Read more