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A harmonious exchange
Page 18
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The future of fleet management may well lie with Isotrak's next-generation technology, which allows harmonisation not just with one firm but everyone you deal with.
Words: Julian Mitnes
ACCORDING TO Freight Best Practice calculations, based on the 1.39 million kilometres run by vehicles in the food and drink sector in 2007,24.1% of food kilometres are empty running.
This figure may be hard to swallow, but empty running is a fact of haulage life, something the operator has to accept and absorb into its bottom line.
There will never be a fleet that has no empty running, is synchronised to perfection on its deliveries and runs without any loss of productivity.
This is down to one thing each business has its own timetable and therefore marches to a different beat.
Yet imagine having all yourcustomers' -and even suppliers' -fleet management data to hand to analyse, enabling you to further harmonise your operation with theirs and, in turn, identify any opportunities.
The sales and marketing director at fleet management systems company Isotrak, Craig Sears-Black. believes the future could well see this higher form of data management becoming a reality.
His words aren't to be taken lightly; after all, Isotrak's Active Transport Management System technology (see panel) is employed by the likes of the big four supermarket chains: Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrison& "It's been the Holy Grail for many years, but what's been lacking is the ability to interface between all the different systems, which has made it impractical to operate.
"Everything has been on a one-toone basis individual supplier and customer sharing data together."
What Isotrak is aiming to achieve is a linking of data for all users of its fleet management technology, enabling companies to study information across the board.
"One company will now be able to share data with 20. "It has massive potential to improve a company's productivity by reducing empty running and also increasing vehicle fill."
At the centre of this new way of planning is user-friendly software aimed at allowing the easy linking of a related company on to the Isotrak network (set to be tested by Wincanton).
"The new module allows you to jump on to the network without major preparation. It gives you the ability to input information into the network and then have access to multiple outputs [such as] the KPIs of your customers and suppliers."
However Scars-Black cautions that this advancement isn't going to revolutionise the industry overnight because dissecting and utilising such detailed information is not something that can happen quickly.
"The identification of opportunities is way down the track. Every distribution centre has its own execution cycle; if you try and make recommendations about those operations' trucks, even that is fraught with differences.
"The goal is a gradual improvement in efficiency: incremental gains of 1%, 2% and so on as you further align your fleet with other companies.
For example, 5% on an operation that costs half a billion pounds to run a year is £25m."
So is the world ready for this new way of thinking, taking all that fleet data and crunching it to improve efficiency?
"The market demand is there; we're responding to that," Sears-Black says. •