Automation...is this our future?

That’s been the norm for tankers for years. I pull a dry bulk tanker and I have a card to load myself at *most* places I load. I just hold my card up to the reader and it unlocks the controls. I choose my load and the pattern and it does the rest. When it’s done loading paperwork prints and off I go. I can be in and out in about 10 minutes unless there’s another truck in front of me. I LOVE not having to be manually loaded. That ALWAYS takes at least double the time.

 

It's the cats ### when it works isn't it?

 

It really is! Of course, they have the occasional breakdown. Then, I have to deal with some underpaid curmudgeon that moves like molasses in the winter loading me, which sucks. Lol

 

It’s like that with fuel too. I’m still only a couple months into this but most places including LP just leave you alone. Just use your card and pin/password setup and your ready to build your load. Loading all done by yourself too, not sure if it’s been like this forever but I like it. Just pick up your printed BOL’s in the office or “BOL Shed” and your outta there.

Just don’t make a mistake or you’ll be seeing and talking to a whole bunch of not so happy people…. No automation there!

 

I have a new contract with a company that does metal coating and process for the aircraft industry. The parts are picked up from one manufacturer, it goes to the one plant, they just do one process on the parts and they go off to another processor.

We just do one run from the company to the next processor and being their trailers back.

We use their trailers only which are all brand new. they are sealed and we don’t worry about the count or condition of the freight, all we do is haul the trailers. We even the weight of them before we get off the property.

This company sent us 15 brand new iPad pros with custom apps on it, they are locked down so you can’t do anything with them other than use the company app. I can’t tell you all the whole process (changed one or two things to keep legal in my description) but I think it is going to in the future like this for a lot of you.

So last week was our shakedown trip with empty trailers. I had to go with the driver to learn the process first hand. The driver does all his work on the iPad, the shipping papers are signed by the driver with an apple pen and is transmitted to the office, the Bol is typed out with our letterhead by the driver, someone signs it in the office and it appears on the iPad.

The app assigns him the trailer and when to pick it up (usually 6 minutes after the truck is parked in the staging area) and when it is hooked, the driver confirms he did a pretrip, goes over the scale in the exit lane which is recorded on the app, checks out with the guard who signs off on the check out process and off he goes.

He gets to the drop, check in the guard house, the app assigns the slot to drop the trailer and what trailer to pick up to take it back.

Both ends are the same.

It is pretty slick, it is fast, the driver is expected to be onsite for 20 minutes at most at both ends.

The really nice thing is everything is on the iPad, it can even print to the truck printer if we need a hard copy of any info.

Once the run is complete, we get a notice via email that it was complete and the miles driven for billing purposes with all the check in/out times within 15 minutes.

the one thing that I think is great is on the app, you can see the truck schedule a week out. They don’t ship every day, so the driver can do gap work regionally or go home.

I understand that there is more to the system and integration of some eld systems coming in the future.

the next thing is robots as drivers, we really need this. Paying people money to drive a truck when it should be an honor to do so is tiring.<<<< yes this is a joke!

 

I have a couple customers that automate almost everything, including loading/unloading trailers using robots. A self-serve kiosk replaces Laquanda & the women in the office. I don't think the kiosks are able to ignore drivers for hours or insult us like the typical entitled, angry cubicle dweller but maybe one day.

I'd prefer the kiosks to many staffed offices, since most staffed offices are terrible.

 

In those situations I'm tempted to say "forgive me. I'm mentruating and that always causes me to lose focus and freak out over nothing. I"m sure you understand."

 

Free water.