Tag Archives: vehicle fleet management

The percentage of uptime of a machine or platform is often considered the gold standard in many businesses. Within the computer industry, for instance, it is used to measure an operating system’s reliability or stability. Uptime is certainly an important attribute within the trucking industry. However, it is a fallacy that uptime is the most critical aspect to a fleet operator. More important — the true measure of success — is how many orders are being filled and the percentage of orders which are delivered on time. This doesn’t mean we should minimize the value of a high uptime as… Read More »

The trucking ecosystem bears many similarities to Jurassic Park. The fictional island resort off the coast of Costa Rica showcases live dinosaurs created through preserved DNA. With the improper elements the tropical paradise becomes a disastrous experience. But when carefully engineered, then you have an amazing and profitable new venture. For an ecosystem to be sustainable, each of its components has to coexist and interact in a delicate balance. Until the individual components are tied together, you have no ecosystem.  Consider the components required for truck service management – the driver, the truck (and its components), the truck owner, the fleet manager… Read More »

Maintenance management for trucking fleets today is often a cumbersome and difficult proposition but fortunately a number of positive changes are coming in the years ahead thanks to advances in technology. The concept of simply printing internal shop repair orders will end as internal service business systems must be more user-friendly and offer real-time capabilities. The current in-house business systems need to integrate the demands of a modern day carrier. For instance, the use of GPS and preplanning information from a number of different silos of information including operations databases of current pre-loaded information coupled with information downloaded from a… Read More »

Remember when receiving a phone call was a big deal. Getting a long-distance call, in particular, used to be an unusual and exciting occurrence reserved for a special occasion.  But now the phone is just another commodity that we take for granted, with rock-bottom pricing at pennies a minute making the average call less expensive than a bottle of water. For many, the phone is now an afterthought if other quicker and more convenient methods of communication such as email and text messaging are available. Stop wasting your time and my time and dump the phone as this aging technology… Read More »