TRANSPORT MANAGEMENT Special technology report
<< ability to evaluate and interpret one or more pieces of data to identify a failure mode before a vehicle breakdown occurs or a simple component failure turns into every expense engine or transmission failure,” he said.
Coughlin’s view is that there is a huge difference between vendors who claim to have a web-based system and those who are truly web native. “Boasting a web-based system should be more than simply making your web applications available via the Internet using some third-party middleware,” he said. “These methods are slow, inflexible and often don’t communicate in real time, giving web-based systems a bad name. A truly web-native system will focus on performance and bandwidth, and information will be available instantly as it is being written directly to the hosted database, rather than being uploaded at a given interval.”
Gray considers that, in general, the fleet management industry has suffered from too many vendors coming into the space and then dropping out, leaving clients with an investment bill but no reliable fleet manage - ment solution. “Choosing a vendor is arguably the most important single decision taken when implementing a fleet management solution,” he said. “Between the systems themselves, the use of CANbus to retrieve data from the vehicle broadly separates vendors into two bodies of thought. CANbus ultimately provides more flexibility for highly specialised applications but TomTom’s off-the-shelf systems provide the solution
Fabrice
Maquignon, CEO, Transwide.
for over 90 per cent of organisations without the need to go down this complicated
and often more costly route. This reduces integration time considerably while still offering the end user all the functionality they require.” Gray added that investment in new hardware technology is also starkly different between vendors. “TomTom has pledged to constantly evolve and bring to market solutions with tangible benefits which customers value.”
Fabrice Maquignon, CEO of Transwide, says companies looking for a TMS need to consider a vendor’s innovation cycle – that is, how often new functionality is released – as well as the time, cost and effort required to implement product enhancements. Finally, he states companies must think beyond their four walls and factor in inter- enterprise capabilities, such as the ability to benchmark their transportation performance against other shippers and the ability to execute collaborative shipping processes. “TMS users are no longer just a handful of employees in the transportation department, but hundreds or even thousands of people
across the enterprise and value chain executing a wide range of business processes,” said Maquignon. “And that is one of the fundamental attributes and differentiators of a SaaS TMS. It is a transportation manage - ment system with a built-in network of carriers and other trading partners.”
The Software as a Service model
Taking a closer look at Software as a Service, this is undoubtedly as big a point of discussion within the world of transportation manage ment IT systems as it is in a variety of other branches of IT. And it is not hard to understand why. As Coughlin explains, the SaaS model can provide shared costs between multiple companies, enabling sophisticated enterprise level systems, with benefits such as an Oracle database, delivered in an affordable ongoing way. Felten remembers that, historically, companies were required to buy, build and maintain their IT
infrastructures; SaaS gives companies >>
Nathan Pieri, SVP
marketing & product management, Management Dynamics.
44
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT December 2010
www.logisticsit.com
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