The Kargo Driver App: My 9 month reflection on improving the lives of Indonesia’s truck drivers

When I first started joining Kargo as an intern, I was immediately assigned a big, hairy audacious goal to build the first digital product for our truck drivers. Without any prior experience or much knowledge of the logistics industry, I signed up. Before kicking off the launch of the Driver App, I thought long and hard about this question: how might we re-imagine logistics by creating a delightful digital experience for truck drivers that are doing shipments with Kargo?

The truth about the truck driver’s non-driving tasks

Often overlooked, truck drivers are one of the most important stakeholders in ensuring the success of every shipment in the freight business.

When we think about the job responsibility of a truck driver, we think simply about safely delivering goods from one point to the other. However, It is not common that we understand the hassle of the end to end shipping journey that drivers carry out to make sure that goods are being delivered safely and promptly.

As a starter, monitoring and providing visibility for shipment shippers and transporters is one of the biggest pain points for drivers due to its nature of relying on driver’s instincts when asked about their locations and current shipment status. Today, monitoring and providing visibility is painful for drivers because monitoring is done through phone calls and/or text messages. Drivers are called every few hours by the monitoring team to get their whereabouts. As a result, drivers are not able to put their full focus on the road and have to rely on their mental estimations to provide their precise location and ETA to loading/unloading warehouses. Failing to do these tasks will diminish their credibility, putting their job at risk. At the heart of logistics is planning and monitoring. Visibility for shipment stakeholders is an important metric in the trucking industry because it demonstrates every drivers’ success. Moreover, shipment monitoring is important to give stakeholders confidence and transparency on shipment status

Truck drivers face issues with their financial liquidity. Due to constant delays in loading/unloading schedules, drivers are impacted by additional expenses. Trucks drivers do not get sufficient money for travel if they constantly face delays in origin/destination warehouses. Today, the success of a loading/unloading process is communicated by word of mouth or via phone call, this is not ideal and unreliable. In addition, shipment completion becomes slow because it requires finding the correct point-of-contact via phone call. As a result, drivers receive their travel expenses late and are forced to spend money from their personal savings account.

Why is it challenging to solve freight pain points through technology?

Our demographic of truck drivers comprise of 30–60-year-old drivers, who are not regular technology users. While we live in a tech-heavy world, learning something new might still be uncomfortable. This creates a big blocker for us towards creating a solution through the use of technology. However, we found that the best way to motivate drivers to adopt digital solutions is to develop a technology that can meaningfully improve their day-to-day shipment pain point

During the early stages of the Driver App, we focused on building the infrastructure that covers the basic day to day shipment tools for drivers. Our specific goal is to help drivers in streamlining monitoring and visibility through technology. As a result, we want to eliminate drivers’ need to have back and forth calls with the shipment monitoring teams.

Shipment status updates

We want to solve the inefficiencies of shipment documentation: clarity of shipment status update, digital document upload, and live tracking. Drivers can now update their shipment statuses as well as the timestamp of each activity through the Driver App. Hence, easier and more accurate tracking for Transporters, Shippers, and Kargo’s team.

Offline Mode

Due to the frequent, poor signal problems around shipment routes, we created a feature that would allow our drivers to update their shipment statuses and provide live tracking without signal. These data are stored offline and are made available when drivers are back online. As a result, shipment stakeholders can have access to the latest shipment information quicker than they can call their drivers.

View and submit Warehouse Reviews

Drivers are now able to submit their experience in the loading/unloading warehouses through a review and rating survey. Other Drivers can view the reviews of their assigned load/unload warehouses to have better expectations for their assigned shipment locations.

Automated status update

While drivers are busy trying to get into warehouses, our app’s geofencing system allows us to automatically save the time of arrival at loading/unloading locations without any click of a button. This allows us to help drivers focus on the logistics while we ensure accurate shipment status updates to stakeholders.

Watch out for our next releases as we continue to reimagine logistics for our truck drivers through technology!