There are several shared initiatives across the trucking industry lately – reducing fuel, going green, paperless deliveries, improving safety, etc. – however one of the most common is supply chain visibility.
At the recent NPTC Conference, many private fleet executives voiced their concern regarding the challenges they face in integrating the many disparate technologies they use in their organization to improve their visibility across their supply chain and increase productivity. Consider the technologies that are often used in most of today’s leading fleets: routing, dispatch, fleet management, warehouse management, maintenance systems, hr/payroll systems, and financial systems are just a few of the core systems needed to run their business. Unfortunately, many of these systems are very insular in their design and provide limited data integration capabilities. For example, two of the most common routing platforms used in the private fleet industry can only export their data as a flat file or .CSV file. The same holds true for the industry’s most widely used dispatch system. Many other systems provide APIs (application programming interface) that are based on proprietary languages or formats.
It’s time for an industry group or consortium to define certain technology standards for integrating transportation systems. If we look at the global software leaders and enterprise application providers, all of them have embraced XML-based web services and service oriented architecture as the standard way to interoperate across disparate applications. This is extremely prevalent in the supply chain arena, where legacy, mainframe applications are now accessible by more current web-based systems. Karen Butner, IBM’s Supply Chain Management Lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value describes SOA as the “Blueprint for Supply Chain Visibility”.
Now is the time to standardize the data made available to and from fleet management systems (assets, accounts, products, driver performance, vehicle performance, delivery data, time and attendance data, etc.) as web services, making them consumable in a standard way by any other system. Cadec will push to be at the forefront of this initiative, and enable fleet managers to achieve better supply chain visibility and improve the overall returns on their technology investments.
Author: Frank Moreno
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Driving End-to-End Automation
Extending Supply Chain Management into the Cab of your Vehicles
Cadec Global, Inc
Driving End-to-End Automation
About Cadec Global, Inc.
Cadec Global enables mobile asset optimization, process automation and operations visibility through its advanced fleet management solutions. With over 30 years of innovation and experience in the trucking industry, Cadec enables transportation and distribution managers, fleet and logistics experts and business executives to reduce costs, enhance customer service, enforce compliance and safety regulations, and improve driver productivity. Cadec’s marquee customer list includes market-leading private and for-hire fleets across multiple industries throughout North America.
