Picture a carrier's user tweeting and texting, his fingers poised earnestly on his mobile, his eyes awash with colorful imagery, and his mind dizzy with an abundance of sensory stimuli.
Now imagine the same user hunched up at his desk, his shoulders drooping like the wilting branches of a neglected roadside tree, staring at his monitor, responding to tenders in OTM, his brain nearing the point of self-imposed hibernation.
Before presumptuously advocating the use of OTM mobile for everyone - in this case, the carriers - let us look at the benefits if there are any
1.Shuffling order movements
A carrier receives multiple shipment tenders from his manufacturing or 3PL partners. The carrier proceeds to accept some of these tenders. Once the tenders are accepted, the carrier sends his trucks to fulfill the transportation services that he has hitherto accepted. At this point, the shipment is frozen, that is to say, the shipment cannot be modified by way of adding or removing orders from it.
But of course this is far from practical. Drivers assigned to the trucks can't make any rearrangements, namely, swapping a whole order or part of an order with other drivers. Once the tenders are accepted, the process is quite rigid and inflexible. If it is the same carrier who is operating in the same lane and his fleet comprises of multiple trucks, it should be possible to rearrange, isn't it?
Consider this - Truck 'A' with shipment 'A' onboard set off to its destination. But there is a breakdown and the truck is unable to deliver the goods. The driver swishes in his pockets and pulls out of his mobile, pinches his screen to locate his truck. Now, on the map, he can see a couple of other trucks just around the corner. He extracts the equipment utilization report and finds that the other trucks are underutilized and that they can carry some of his orders, the ones that are labeled 'overnight' or 'expedited.' He quickly summons the trucks and unloads few items from his truck, scans them judiciously as he hands them over to the other drivers.
Wouldn't it be useful to be able to do achieve this in a mobile application?
To make this happen, the carrier's transportation system, OTM or otherwise, must be able to send an actual shipment XML to the source OTM instance that has the planned shipment. The planned shipment is associated with order movements via the shipment equipment. Once the actual shipment XML is received, agents can be used to identify the order movements that were offloaded from the truck that broke down in transit and remove them from the shipment equipment. Similarly, the planned shipment of the truck that carried order movements in addition to what was accepted in the tender has to be modified by adding ship units to its shipment equipment.
2. Carrier invoices with delta cost
Some carriers invoice their partners regularly as and when the shipments are delivered. But most carriers invoice periodically, namely, month end invoicing. Now, a lot can happen between the first and last day of a month - the sun may run out of its hydrogen atoms and the earth may be plunged into eternal darkness! There is very little that OTM can do to handle sun's demise...
But, OTM of course can be configured to handle other miserly exceptions that arise purely out of the way the logistics industry operates. For instance, by the time the carrier invoices its 3PL or manufacturing partner, the contracts would have been renegotiated or the surcharges could be updated. The way we handle these delta changes between the invoice and the matched shipment is by configuring the service provider to copy delta costs at the time of approving the invoice.
Now, let's add a bit of flavor to this. Let's say the driver is unable to take the usual route due to unforeseen accidents on that route. He takes a different route and ends up paying for driving thru multiple toll gates, and even booking for an overnight stay at a roadside inn. These additional expenses are usually 'customer recoverable' and the driver should be able to flag them on his OTM mobile application.
If the driver also decides to get his truck's headlights fixed or change the brake pedals, it is hardly a case for recovering from the customer though.
At the end of the month, before invoice is made out to the customer, the drivers' supervisor receives a notification on his mobile while he is on the site, busy assigning shipments to this fleet. On his OTM mobile, he gets to review the additional costs incurred against each invoice, the estimated and actual invoice amounts paired for quick reading.
Other examples of these accessorial costs could be the original driver enlisting help of other truck drivers. So, for instance the truck has left location A and is on its way to location D via locations B and C. This is a multi-stop shipment. On his way, the driver is alerted on his OTM mobile of another truck driver in his vicinity who is on his way to location D, this being a direct shipment. The second driver is shipping a return delivery which happens to be completely unplanned. Owing to the nature of this return delivery, his truck now appears as a notification for other truck drivers near him on the integrated Maps application. The original driver can now choose to offload some of his orders onto the return delivery truck depending on the other truck's equipment capacity. Now that some of the orders have been offloaded, the original truck may not need to visit few locations on his route, thereby reducing the overall cost. The original driver should be able to indicate this on his OTM mobile which must transpire as a negative cost line item of his truck's invoice. The return delivery driver may incur an additional fuel surcharge which would correspond to a new accessorial cost on his truck's invoice.
To achieve this, we would have to add invoicing functionality to OTM mobile. Picture this interface alongside the standard set of screens that we are already getting in standard OTM mobile -
Carriers can select/deselect few order movements with the click of a button and promote the changes all the way to invoices. We can trigger invoice XML from the OTM mobile once the driver makes his edits and logs a delivery event at the destination. This way the information between orders and invoices is always in sync and few invoices would fail auto-approval. Also, the invoice-generation itself will be real-time thereby eliminating manual reconciliation which is taxing and prone to errors.
In short, making carriers more inclusive in the digital transformation.
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Written by: Kranthi Askani