In any business, there are things that people should be doing and there are things that computers should be doing. Computers should be doing more than making people's jobs easier and more than just making people more efficient. They should in fact be doing things that people should not be doing. There are things that computers cannot do. They cannot establish relationships and shake hands with new customers. They cannot train drivers and they cannot inspect a truck. They cannot anticipate and they cannot make moral judgments. These are all things that people do. Computers can, however, do many things that people don't do well. People don't perform routine activities well. People are not robots. Computers essentially are. They do what they are told. And they'll do it over and over until the job is done.
So to be efficient is to use computers for all that they do well, and use people for all that they do well.
Here are a few examples of jobs that people working in the transportation industry ordinarily perform that computers should really be performing.
Taking Freight Orders - Whether you receive your freight via the telephone or via fax, you're still spending a lot of time and a lot of money to actually get the order into your system. More and more shippers are demanding tools at the carrier's end that will allow the shipper to eliminate this step. They want their systems to talk to the trucker's system. If your only methods of receiving freight orders are through the telephone, fax machine and email, you are severely limiting your potential customer base.
Dispatching Drivers - Sitting on hold, waiting to talk to a dispatcher has always been an unpopular aspect of being a commercial truck driver. It's expensive, talk time is not free and time is not free. It's also aggravating do-nothing time. Drivers don't like this. It's inefficient. Giving out directions to drivers over the phone is at best painful and often impossible. And it's unnecessary; with all the ways available to communicate with drivers and for drivers to navigate it's just not the efficient way of doing anything.
Managing Transactions - The money handling end of the whole freight movement process is ordinarily quite expensive to administer as well. A customer has to be invoiced. Payments have to be received and deposited. Carriers and drivers have to be paid. Fuel companies have to be paid. The list goes on. For most transportation companies these transactions are very similar and mostly routine. Virtually all of these activities should be completely automated.
Successful companies analyze where they are spending their money and what exactly is the return on all the money spent. Companies that make the highest profits spend the minimum amount of time and money pursuing activities that don't yield a return. This means that most of their activities are directed towards revenue generating pursuits.