Truckcom Blog

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?

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.