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commandalkon.com | 30 shop or to recommend immediate shutdown, preventing damage to the truck and mitigating the risk of hurting the driver. With the information being provided to the shop in real time, mechanics can be proactive in ordering and stocking parts that can get vehicles back on the road faster and generating revenue. Optimize Fuel Usage When your vehicle isn't running properly, it also burns more fuel. Engine data analysis helps to analyze fuel economy and drill down to find out which trucks are running poorly. Being notified about events like speeding, acceleration, and hard braking can help fleet managers to address those issues with the driver and can also improve fuel economy. By planning, monitoring, and managing transport moves, less fuel is used. Turn-by-turn visual and audible directions can also help to decrease fuel usage because drivers aren't wasting time and fuel searching for an address. Visibility tools with telematics and transportation management enables companies to do more with less, decreasing fleet size and the amount of fuel that's needed to operate. The ability to properly optimize truck routes and plan is a game changer for achieving more with fewer trucks. Some companies have even been able to decrease fleet size by 14%, helping to reduce their carbon footprint. Transportation management systems that work in conjunction with Telematics can be used to optimize material hauling, ultimately helping to lower costs and increase profits. Systems like these make fleet management a breeze because the user can keep an up-to-date roster of all of the trucks and drivers that are available, whether they are owned trucks or third-party haulers, providing a way to tap into the entire network of trucks. Another great way to impact the bottom line is optimizing truck usage by reducing empty-bed time. By creating geofences for loading and unloading locations, systems like this can provide visibility into how long trucks are spending on those sites. Time to Retire Paper Processes Considering the obvious first, construction projects are riddled with time-consuming data entry and reconciliation tasks. Consider an operation that has 6 full time back office personnel that handle payroll and billing. Generally, billing takes several days – sometimes even 15 days – due to the amount of manual processes that take place in order to get the job done. Think about the efficiencies that could be gained if hauling invoices could be reconciled daily. You could potentially consolidate to only two back office personnel and be able to invoice haulers daily – that's a 33% reduction in your labor associated with invoicing – and have the other 4 focused on other areas of the company. Not to mention, quicker invoicing keeps haulers paid and happy, keeping them from leaving and placing more strain on a worker shortage. Ticket management has been a massive headache in the industry for decades due to paper tickets piling up, losing tickets, inaccurate quantities, and fraud. Cloud-based digital ticketing can solve these decades-long issues. For the jobs that are still operating on paper tickets, drivers can simply take a picture of the ticket while Optical Character recognition extracts the data to be verified. Digital tickets are the best way to make inaccuracies and fraud a thing of the past, and with this technology, all the tickets are now digitized, stored, and organized to easily create invoices. Trucking companies can also generate QR codes and have drivers scan them with the app. Once a job is completed and invoices need to be created, there's no need for accounting to go back and manually record all of those paper tickets to draft an invoice. This is already done in the invoicing section. Invoices can be sent to customers' inboxes in seconds or can be exported as a CSV file if that is preferred. Invoicing in the past would take weeks, even months in some cases. Now invoices can be out the door in a matter of minutes after a job is completed, keeping books up-to-date and paying drivers for their hard work. After years and years of inefficiencies plagued by this manual paper ticket process, how can we continue to expect paper tickets to do what they were never designed to do? Digital collaboration in real time will never be possible with paper tickets. The ability to exchange digital data with supply chain trading partners will arm the trucking industry to capture more actionable data, share it, and use it to improve productivity and cost control. Rich Haus serves as the Director of Telematics and Ryan Winter serves as the Director of Customer Success - Enterprise and Growth at Command Alkon. PREDICTIONS The ability to exchange digital data with supply chain trading partners will arm the trucking industry to capture more actionable data, share it, and use it to improve productivity and cost control.

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