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by Pavel Botev
Women make up 41% of the supply chain workforce, according to the 2021 Women in Supply Chain Survey by Gartner. It marks the highest percentage since the survey started in 2016. For the first time, you can feel and see representation. So, what's next? How will you lead your operations and continue to break ceilings for women in trucking?
An understanding of technology is prerequisite for leaders in business today. In logistics, it's essential for the continuous improvement this volatile market requires. It also empowers leaders to make instant decisions around rates, dispatch, safety, accounting, and more.
Among the most important advancements are the ones that save you time. If you are new to a leadership position, you now have even less time time on your calendar; you're responsible for managing people's careers in addition to keeping operations running smoothly.
Real-time tracking, instant back-office reporting like IFTA, and integrations across accounting, load boards, and ELDs are the three of today's most important time savers.
1. Real-time tracking really saves you a lot of time
Trucking companies today need to report the location of their goods to customers while in transit. In the past, this meant more customer service, which meant more people making more phone calls. Trucking software makes those calls for your via API, funneling communication from truck, trailer, and driver directly to your customer. They also produce tracking links that share the current location of loads, miles left to deliver, time in and out for pickup (and deliveries once the load is finalized), and all load related documents.
2. Take back time for your back-office
Take IFTA reporting, for example: carriers need to track gallons of fuel purchased and miles driven per state across several sources. These processes can occur without intervention so IFTA is ready-to-be-filed with each quarter at the click of a button. With this structure you can also ensure the bill is distributed equitably: reports organized like this can be filtered by truck to see miles driven and fuel purchased.
Keeping track of safety milestones throughout the year can also be a costly, manual time suck, particularly in the weeks leading up to and during periods of heightened crackdowns, like Brake Safety Week. Trucking platforms offer alerts for your driver, truck and trailer needs so you can update documents before an audit in the same place you communicate and dispatch with your drivers.
3. The Rise of the Integration
It's important you understand where to create connections in your business. For example, do you need better communication between driver and back-office or driver and customer?
Clean Up Your Books By Making Them Digital
Logistics leaders often tell us it “takes an entire day to input all the information necessary into Quickbooks.” The market will go up and down, but one thing remains true–your time is better spent on tasks other than bookkeeping. Trucking platforms can now integrate directly with Quickbooks, allowing you to avoid any manual entry of invoices.
Stop Switching Between Load Boards By Switching on Integrations
Load board integrations are a hot topic these days. This type of integration creates a single entry point to most of the demand available nationwide and allows you to sort, filter, and instantly accept loads without having to manually build them. There are also a number of other time saving elements like having follow-up load suggestions for your trucks and ability to seamlessly post capacity to load boards to reduce asset idle time.
Make your ELDs Work for you, Not the Other Way Around
ELD integrations can automate manual tasks that take way too much time and better inform your decisions on how you manage fleets and fill trucks. The key is organizing the ELD data and connecting it seamlessly to the areas of your business that can use it, like safety and dispatch.
About Kamion
We are logistics lifers obsessed with making carrier lives easier through technology. We give small and mid-sized fleets access to the First Digital Carrier Platform so they can make sense and actually use their own data to improve operations. This means easy planning, zero-effort tracking, stress-free dispatching, no more safety headaches, and dedicated Carrier Consultants to guide you along the way. For more information, please visit: kamion.io.