Truckcom Blog

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.

That’s because the second operator is using the power of a tracking system, combined with the internet, to join everything together. When they need to know where a vehicle is, they don’t pick up the phone – they just look on the screen. And they take it to a new level from there – they just give their customer a username and password and the customer can check on the web to see where the vehicles doing their jobs are. Then the driver gets a delivery signature on-screen on his smartphone and the customer sees it straightaway on the web. The second operator just won some work from a new customer because the customer saw the way they operate and liked the idea of that level of control. The first operator would have no chance in that competition – and the second operator won it, while saving time and making things easier for his staff into the bargain.

Back in the bad old days, this sort of technology was oversold – no doubt about it. A lot of people were told they could do anything – and paid the money – and found they couldn’t. But as time passes, technology gets better, and now it’s got to the stage where the early promise of these systems is being delivered. Our system, www.truckcom.co.uk, does all the things my “second operator” was doing – and much more.

You do need to be careful when you choose a system – there are still pitfalls. But there are lots of things you can do to avoid them. I’ll cover a few of these in the next blog entry.