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AN AMERICAN
BULLDOG
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32 DC VELOCITY JUNE 2018 www.dcvelocity.com
saving between 40 minutes and an
hour of driver time per day by automating the tracking of trailers and
containers.
“That adds up to a lot over the
course of a year,” he says. “It can
add up fairly quickly in terms of cost
savings and driver frustration. Every
trucking company is looking at any
way it can to retain the drivers it has
or attract new ones. If you can save a
driver 40 minutes to an hour by not
looking for a trailer in a big yard …
that’s an [advantage].”
In addition, cloud-driven mileage
reports help improve fleet main-
tenance, augmenting the routine visual
checks most companies rely on drivers to
perform. Fleet managers can also use the
solution to improve security. BlackBerry
Radar can detect when a trailer door is
open in a high-risk area, for instance, and
send an alert to the driver and/or fleet
manager. It also detects and sends alerts if
something is missing from the trailer or if
the trailer is not fully loaded.
EVOLVING TRENDS
Warehousing trends are contributing to
the growth of cloud-based asset-tracking
solutions as well. Poulidis points to companies’ desire to store products closer to
the consumer, which has led to a rise in
“warehouses on wheels,” in which some
large retailers are renting trailers from
trucking companies to store products for
quicker delivery to consumers.
“Many people don’t think about the
logistics behind that,” he says, point-
ing to a company’s ability to accurate-
ly stock and replenish these so-called
“micro-warehouses.” “Having visibility
into the capacity of the trailer is import-
ant in those situations.”
A growing comfort level with cloud-
based IT (information technology)
solutions is also helping to sustain the
momentum. Data security and privacy
have been the chief concerns about the
cloud, and those are beginning to ease
as the technology becomes more ubiq-
uitous and providers emphasize security
methods and features. Poulidis points
to the BlackBerry Jarvis software-as-a-
service security analysis tool as an exam-
ple. The tool analyzes software compo-
nents for security and vulnerability. It
was designed for use in the automotive
supply chain but can be applied in other
industries as well.
“For the most part, companies have
overcome concerns they have [about
the cloud]—primarily because in their
lives as consumers, they are comfortable
with cloud-based applications,” explains
Poulidis. “And even in their businesses,
companies are using a lot of cloud-based
services for their daily needs. So I think
it’s a natural thing for them now. It’s a
generally accepted fact that this is how
business is done.”
