Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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MAKING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS WORK FOR YOUR FLEET BY AARON HUFF electricity, Internet and phone ser- vice due to the storm. "We were basically shut down for two days and lost significant revenue in what would otherwise have been a great month with 23 operating days in October," says Dave Ward, presi- dent of the 16-truck dry-van carrier. Most of the company's technology was rendered useless. "The biggest fallback was simple cellphones, if you could keep a car handy to power a charger," Ward says. "But the cell providers limited the call time to about 60 seconds." Ward quickly was able to relocate Price-Tran's dispatch office 1½ hours south to an available building in Wilmington, Del. The move went smoothly because the company's dispatch software and mobile ap- plications are cloud-based. "We could do what many trucking companies couldn't do, and that's be back up and running from anywhere with an Internet connection and cell coverage," he says. Once power and Internet service were restored, operations returned to normal the following week in Al- lentown. For Baylor Trucking, perhaps the most effective technology proved to be a "connected" in-cab naviga- tion system. This technology helped route drivers as road closures, traffic delays and other dynamic events unfolded. The NaviGo system is in- stalled on the company's Qualcomm MCP 100 and 200 onboard com- puting platforms. When drivers are matched with loads, Baylor's dispatch software sends the current vehicle location and route line to NaviGo's servers. The servers calculate a route that is sent to the NaviGo applica- tion in the vehicles for turn-by-turn spoken directions. During the storm, Telogis followed 55 major storm-related road closures that affected 1,165 miles of highway and close to 3,000 road segments. These updates automatically were added to NaviGo as "route modifiers" to help drivers avoid delays. Telogis collects the information from a vari- ety of electronic and human sources, including a community of 120,000 drivers that can report road closures and other information through a feedback feature in NaviGo. As the updates came in, NaviGo automatically identified drivers who were en route to affected areas, notified them of road closures and rerouted them. Sandy wasn't the first time – and won't be the last – that Baylor will be using NaviGo to make critical routing decisions to keep drivers safe and its customers happy. Just last summer, the technology helped drivers find the most safe, legal and cost-effective routes to reach customers in Mem- phis during a flood. "It minimized driver frustration and maximized dispatcher time," Baylor says. "We were not scrambling for a resource to get drivers in." AARON HUFF is Senior Editor of Commercial Carrier Journal. E-mail ahuff@ccjmagazine.com or call (801) 754-4296. BRIEF , a provider of enterprise- class fleet management systems, partnered with Innovative Software Engineering to deliver integrated elec- tronic DVIR capabilities for its flagship PowerVue fleet management software. made its R:Com system – which is used for refrigerated trailer monitoring, trailer tracking and in-cab fleet management – available for all vehicle types, including pickup trucks, cargo vans and passenger vehicles. released the newest version of Transflo, its document man- agement system. Updates include the capability to read 2D and 3D barcodes and to store and retrieve native file types, including Microsoft Office and audio, video and graphic files. , a provider of enter- prise business process management ap- plications for transportation, developed an interface with Driver iQ, a full-service background screening information service provider. , a provider of cloud-based mobile software products, announced the in- tegration of ALK's truck-specific CoPilot Truck GPS navigation solution. is providing states adopting its mainline truck screening PrePass service and its in-station 360SmartView system with a single-screen view of all truck activity. , a provider of supply chain execution software systems, released Ac- cellosOne Mobile, a new series of mobile applications for Windows 8 smartphones and tablets that includes equipment inspection forms and real-time access to supply chain information. COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2012 35