Gaining Competitive Advantage through Real Time Information

Transportation executives face a broad array of information technologies capable of dramatically increasing operational efficiencies. Successful combinations of available technologies allow companies to develop advantages over less sophisticated competitors. Proper implementation eliminates information delays inherent in traditional paper shipping documents. Real time information systems feeding automated decision support applications allow transportation companies to increase dispatch efficiency, decrease operational errors and add services otherwise impossible with traditional paper-laden information systems.

The path to real time information advantages hides in a bewildering forest of technology options. Proponents of circuit-switched cellular, digital cellular, packet-switched networks, and satellite-based tracking and communication techniques vie for executives' attention. Other companies offer global positioning systems as a path to increased efficiency. Still others cite sophisticated fixed and mobile computer systems, battery operated printing systems, radio tagging, infrared communications, or other technologies as the best first step for automating transportation operations.

Only successful combinations of technologies deliver true strategic advantages.Most of the technologies competing for executives' attention offer worthwhile, but isolated, improvements. Only proper integration of multiple technologies can fundamentally transform the competitive position of transportation companies. Companies who quickly exploit integrated real time information systems can leverage their advantage into increasing market share. Followers will find such information systems a competitive necessity required to maintain market position against increasing competition and rising customer expectations.

Rising customer expectations require increasingly sophisticated transportation logistics practices.

Your customers' expectations keep rising. Part of the change in attitude comes from the overnight package delivery business. Package delivery companies compete with each other based on increasingly stringent service promises. What began as a promise for "absolutely positively overnight" escalated to promises of delivery in the morning, then before the morning coffee and now "same day next city." Sophisticated information systems allow shippers to call any time of the day or night and find out exactly where their packages are. Within minutes of a package delivery, competitive couriers can tell a customer not only when it was delivered but who signed for it. Rising expectations in the air freight business spills over into the transportation and trucking industries. Your customers now expect deliveries between specific hours, not just on certain days.

Changes in your customers' operations also increase delivery expectations and simultaneously increase the consequences of service failures. Just-in-time material management by manufacturers, retailers, and distributors transforms a late truck into idle assembly lines, lost sales, and angry clients.

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