Truckcom Blog

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.