MarketWaves and rebuilding trucking’s tech backbone
Why we need a new logistics API
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of presenting Vector’s perspective on the future of digital supply chains at MarketWaves18 in Texas. It was an incredible group, and as a trucking tech startup, it was an honor to be ranked among transportation heavyweights like UPS, Amazon and Tesla in an inaugural class of industry innovators recognized in the Freight.Tech25.
My talk started with a familiar scene for just about anyone who’s attended a conference: technical difficulties. With a 7-minute shot clock ticking, I pivoted from my stalled live demo of our on-the-road LoadDocs document scanning app to focus on the fundamentals that still often stunt a range of promising trucking technologies.
In logistics, like many industries, information is time and money. More specifically, the tendency to rely on manually writing, mailing or inputting crucial trip documents like bills of lading slows down processing time for both customer invoicing and driver payments.
In the tech world, the term for the way different programs and people communicate is “API” (short for Application Program Interface). As it stands, paper is the de -facto API of the trucking industry; in order for successful digital transformation to happen, we need to be able to better consume and understand the key business data too often entered on forms and filed away.
Day to day, though, driving realities like crumpled up bills of lading and drivers with drastically different types of cell phones can often seem like unavoidable roadblocks. At MarketWaves, I showed this doesn’t have to be the case by quickly extracting the data from a torn, crooked bill of lading.
That’s just one example of a much greater challenge to be overcome. The logistics industry should be striving to eliminate manual data entry.
In order for that to happen, we need to move data that is offline — and in trucking, there is tons of it — to information that is online. Interested in being part of the movement? Take a free test drive of our LoadDocs app.
