Today there is a rich and diverse choice of software selections available for almost every trucking company and freight broker. Most of these software choices provide tremendous efficiency benefits. However, these software applications are often like “islands of processing systems” within an organization and across business partners.
In order to meet the challenges presented by today’s competitive atmosphere, carriers and brokers, large and small, need the ability to solve problems quickly without having to move through multiple software applications to do so. In other words they need to have access to information quickly through integrated software and information systems.
When you are using more than one system (multiple websites, mileage software, accounting and customer relationship management as examples) additional work is required in moving from system to system.
Having more than one customer also will lead to multiple requirements and systems. The presence of multiple systems and software will inevitably require engineering solutions to integrate them.
All these problems can be grouped together as the problems of software development today, viewed from the engineering aspect. As a broker or carrier you need to develop a strategy to bridge the gap created by the various technologies. In other words, you need to integrate.
Integration of systems and information can lead to some very quantifiable benefits, such as: