The Trucking Nerd

With all types of businesses moving merchandise at high levels during the busy Christmas season, vehicle tracking is more valuable than ever. Enabling GPS vehicle tracking allows organizations to keep costs down and to better enable the on-time delivery of goods.

The tight deadlines during the busy holiday season become even tighter as Dec. 25 gets closer. Customers want to ensure that the scheduled arrival date and time are met and that all of the Christmas gifts will be placed underneath the tree by Christmas Eve.

Another concern for many businesses is the deliverance of larger loads during the active Christmas holiday season. With the noticeably higher values of increased freight volume, businesses will want to ensure their vehicles are on pace to reach their destinations on time.

Enabling vehicle tracking will also ensure customer satisfaction. The importance of customer service cannot be stressed enough during this time of year. When shipments consistently arrive on time, customers relax and are more apt to continue to bring in business. Ensuring that satisfaction during a busy time of the year will cement customer satisfaction.

Another benefit to having vehicle tracking is being able to quickly determine what issues have occurred if a delivery is late or if it has not arrived at the appropriate location and time. Without this feature, it may take a significant amount of time and money to determine the reason for the lateness. With the feature, the location and status of the vehicle may be quickly determined.

Also, if the driver is lost, assistance may quickly be given since the location can be quickly attained. This is especially important during Christmas season when snow or other undesirable weather may cause unexpected delays or cause a driver to become lost. Also, if a delivery is going to arrive late, having this feature will allow a new estimated arrival time to be quickly determined and passed on to the customer.

At any time of the year, those who take advantage of vehicle tracking will receive significant benefits of increased efficiency and productivity. However, these benefits are increased during Christmas season given the significant amount of shipping that goes on during this period.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve been swamped working on several different fronts and projects with a mix of clients and am running across some pretty exciting thoughts that I intend to post some articles on.  I thought I’d drop a quick line for those of you who are still tuned in wondering what the T-Nerd has been up to. 

Some of the topics I’ve queued up include open source business intelligence, outsourcing collaboration overseas I’ve been involved with and a sweet mobile GPS application I’m in progress of building which will be spun off as yet another side venture!

On a side note, if anyone wants a Trucking Nerd Mug, let me know.  The first batch I ordered were a misprint with the ink which faded so they sent me another batch for free, however they also were a misprint, so now I’ve got mugs coming out the wazoo.  Just drop me a line, you pick up shipping and I’ll gift you a mug!

Popularity: 96% [?]

When it first dawned on me that the deadline for analog cell service was coming to a closure in 2008, I didn’t think much about it.  After all, it is reported that only 1% of the cell phone population use a cell phone that is analog only, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that there are millions of devices around the US that rely solely on analog, and many of them are not phones, they are devices like OnStar, GPS tracking systems, alarm system devices, etc.  When the analog service is shutoff, these devices will be rendered useless.  This could happen as early as February 18th, 2008 since this is the date the FCC says it is ok for cell companies to shutoff analog services.

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Popularity: 47% [?]

This week Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework.  While the 3.0 framework has been out for sometime now, the 3.5 framework builds on this and adds some additional features to the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).  So why is this worthy of a blog entry? 

The answer is simple! Microsoft’s latest strategy with the .NET platform is brilliant.  At a recent MSDN event I attended, the presenter stated that they had basically concluded that the only thing developers should have to worry about are the elements that are unique to the business requirements they are programming.  These fall into two simple categories, 1) the User Interface (UI) and 2) the business rules.  All other code components are not unique across applications nor across businesses and industries.

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Popularity: 55% [?]

Aaron Huff who runs the Private Fleets blog has just posted an interesting article based on an presentation from Dr. Joseph Salvo, the manager of the Pervasive Decisioning Systems at the GE Global Research Center. In this article Dr. Salvo discusses the end of the information age and the beginning of the systems age. He also makes reference to the fascinating topic of swarm intelligence and gives some real world insight to how these concepts apply to the transportation industry and what the future will hold, some very cool ideas and concepts!

Popularity: 32% [?]