Now this is bold and daring – blogging on the usually very dry and boring topic of standards!
Everyone agrees to the necessity of standards – from highway standards to manufacturing standards to interconnect standards to performance standards – but who wants to talk about them (except maybe standards geeks and regulators)?
Okay, I admit it, I’m a standards geek from way back — originally in the telecom world, and now in the trucking world. Before I even joined Decisiv full-time, I was introduced to Jack Poster at TMC for a primer on VMRS – seriously, I think I was drooling 5 minutes into the discussion. My project at the time was to provide Decisiv with recommendations on implementing VMRS in the Decisiv Service Management Platform (which it has, and that is a subject for a future blog post).
Now that I am at Decisiv full-time, I find myself in the enviable(?) position of “keeper of standards”. I’m finding out it is not at all what I was expecting! Yes, as I would expect, there’s the VMRS support and the standardized interfaces we are creating with fleet and service provider business systems (another future blog topic). And of course standard operations with standard repair times and parts lists (see for example, “Decisiv Adds New Information Source”) — I get all that.
What was unexpected was the realization that what we are all about here at Decisiv is standardizing the communication process between fleets, their service locations, and the OEs to get trucks in and out of shops and back on the road as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Now that is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal!
Accomplishing it in fact is not the BHAG – we have fleet customers communicating with breakdown call centers communicating with service providers communicating with OE field staff over our platform today. The BHAG is in transforming service management across the heavy truck industry so that threaded, time-stamped, multi-party communication is the norm (anywhere, anytime, from any device); so that vehicle information and service history sitting in the cloud is constantly updated and always available wherever a unit goes; and so that repair information is delivered at the point of service, intelligently and in-context with a given unit and complaint.
How do we get there from here? Fleet-by-fleet (over a hundred and counting), service network-by-service network (over 800 service locations and counting), and side-by-side with our growing ecosystem of OE, information source and technology partners.
No wonder I’m exhausted at the end of the day!
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