Emergence of Automation in the Freight Industry
Technology in the freight industry has been making huge progress in the past few years. One of the first pushes of this new wave of technological integration was the emergence of Freight Visibility. Freight Visibility allowed freight brokers and carriers to track their fleet in real time, and provide up to the second accurate data. This was obviously a huge breakthrough in the market and has since lead to a wealth of additional new technological advances.
The biggest push that has been brought about by freight visibility has been the automation of tasks in most freight management systems that have traditionally been tedious and manual. Logistics planning in the freight industry is a complicated process, and anything that can simplify it provides a large advantage to freight operations managers.
A lot of the logistical and supply chain process involves fairly simple tasks that can eat up a lot of time. These are the type of tasks that can be easy to miss because there are so many of them to do to ensure that every truck delivers on time. Whenever a truck is delivering freight there is a customer that needs frequent updates, so they can manage warehouse inventory numbers, dock scheduling, loading times and more. The task list goes on and on.
Because of the simple nature of these chores, they are quite easy to automate with today’s software capabilities, thus they are now often being integrated with freight management systems.
While they started out as single-use systems for focusing on freight visibility, freight management apps now provide a multitude of functions that automate a lot of tasks for freight carriers, brokers, and other managers to provide important predictive analytics to their customers. This also provides these managers with not only more information on their fleet at any given time, but it also directly allows them to improve their management efficiency and cut costs through automation.