Expert Q&A: How Strategic Technology is Keeping Freight Resilient

Q1 closed out with a crash course on business continuity and disaster recovery for all players in the global economy.  The value of contingency planning and strategic technology usage is now nearly impossible to ignore. 

Richard Greening, DDC’s Global Director of Technology, discusses how freight technology is evolving, identifies the tools currently at the top of the list for most transportation companies, and describes how companies incorporate them into their everyday processes.

What are the most prevalent capabilities the transportation sector seeks from tech companies?

Technology is helping transportation providers pivot in a way we never thought possible. SMC3's online learning tools are assisting remote employees to stay educated on industry-specific topics, video capabilities are being used for driver interviews to combat the ongoing driver shortage, and transportation management systems (TMS) like BluJay are helping companies manage relentless schedules with skeleton crews and even optimize routes to avoid COVID-19 hot zones. ;

Additionally, we are seeing greater uptake of mobile application development and a rise in broker applications. Companies like Uber Freight and Convoy are allowing carriers to manage loads on their mobile devices. We see a definite uptake in other industry developers following suit and building mobile applications.  

What specific initiatives can supply chain leaders consider now to increase ROI?

Transportation companies are utilizing data visualization products like FreighWaves Sonar and Chainalytics. These tools allow companies to analyze the freight economy and market trends and compare their business performance against other industry leaders.

Carriers are also embracing cognitive computing and robotic process automation (RPA) to help increase their quality metrics and overall efficiency. A few prominent examples would be load matching, asset utilization, and business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions (like freight billing with machine learning).

These models save money and time and empower business leaders to refocus on what they’re naturally great at – like meeting or exceeding their shipper’s expectations.

How can the shipping & logistics industry determine whether investing in these technologies right now makes sense?

If companies have managed to get their business to a sustainable state and their key influencers can work on this, now is a great time to implement these technologies since the lessons learned over the past few weeks are still fresh in everyone’s minds.

The common mistake is trying to fix everything with technology. Contingency planning should be business-led, not IT-driven. It’s about taking the time to communicate with the right people in your business to help you identify the different potential scenarios and discuss the weak points and single points of failure so that you can identify the technology that will fix your concerns and business needs. The key to success is to include your IT leaders at every step of this process, not necessarily to drive the discussions but to complement them.  

What hurdles can companies expect to face and plan to overcome in the implementation phase?

An infamous report from the Project Management Institute (PMI) stated that 14% of IT projects fail. It also states that of the projects that didn’t fail outright, 31% didn’t meet their goals, and 43% exceeded their initial budgets. The common mistakes here are never deliberate and often include unrealistic goals, poor “guesstimations,” and bad planning.  

After identifying a challenge and a possible solution, plan a ‘System Development Lifecycle’. If you can ask your team the right questions from inception through to the disposal of a system (before you’ve built it) you will start getting realistic answers rather than optimistic ones.  

To learn more from Richard about how tech will evolve this year, watch his recent interview with the FreightWaves 'What The Truck?!?' podcast crew: