EOX Vantage Blogs

Increasing driver retention is one of the holy grails of fleet management right now. We hear a lot from our transportation clients about the importance of finding and keeping good truck drivers. One approach we’re pleased to see gaining traction is the simple philosophy of treating drivers fully as people in a demanding occupation, rather than as commodities or monetized assets.

Driving, as a job, requires a lot of time, effort and attention. The idea is to respect the drivers and their time, treat them well and make life easier for them. Here are a couple ways to simplify the driving life that also have the effect of improving your operations and hopefully your profitability.

Published in CCJ Digital | May 4, 2021

Fact #1: Vast amounts of actionable data are available to trucking companies and more is compiled all the time and from all over the place. It comes especially through telematics, but also from ELDs, dashboard cams and TMS components, even outside sources like from the company's own insurers, motor vehicle records, VIN databases or federal safety collections.

Fact #2: Today's transportation industry is placing an ever-stronger emphasis on safety. Companies prioritize and make investments into ways to improve training, avert nuclear verdicts, mitigate risks and manage insurance premiums.

Let's bring these two facts together by suggesting that data can and should be used to address all these safety concerns.

Interviewed by Adam Burroughs | Smart Business Magazine | INSIGHTS Digital Transformation

Legacy systems are relied upon to perform an organization's day-to-day work. But, in many cases, technology has improved drastically since companies first implemented those systems, leading to a point at which the tasks those systems perform could strain those systems beyond what they can handle. This opens the door to failure, user frustration and more.

"When your system no longer supports scalability, you lose the competitive advantage in the market," says Nishan Kumar, project manager at EOX Vantage.

Smart Business spoke with Kumar about how to recognize when it's time to address the problems caused by older legacy systems, and how upgrades can improve workflows.

Automation looks to solve problems that arise through manual reporting, an often tedious process that's prone to errors. It also enables organizations to supply the same information to multiple parties or segment it based on their relationship to the data.

"The big thing for organizations now is trying to get clean and consistent information," says Varun Badarinath, senior product engineer at EOX Vantage. "Manual processes tend to create errors that affect data integrity, a foundational component of decision-making. Automation works to get things standardized so data is timely and consistent."

Gap analysis seeks to find and correct the reasons that drive differences between desired/projected outcomes and actual results. The gaps for each company will naturally be different. When we think of the transportation industry taken as a whole, these are a few examples of typical gaps:

It is critical to effectively manage back-office functions: the many essential, nitty-gritty everyday tasks that are necessary for any organization to function properly. For the ultra-competitive transportation industry, it can mean the difference between profit and loss, success or failure.

From data entry to quality checks to back-end workarounds that complete online information requests and such, they are in many ways the engine that drives a transportation business forward. If we're being honest, they're often not enjoyable to do and are often regarded as a slog to get through. Yet without them business can't get done, customers would be unhappy, sales would stop and the enterprise's overall outlook would appear poor.

So, making back-office activities an efficient, humming system should become a goal for any company focused on success. EOX Vantage offers two ways to address back-office tasks that increase revenues, reduce expenses and makes them more efficient.

If there's one industry that generates a lot of paperwork, it's trucking. The piles of paper include bills of lading, registrations, inspection reports, insurance documentation, receipts and accounting files, just to start.

There seems to be no end and it has become a commonly cited pain point that bogs down daily operations. Efficient document management is quickly becoming a vital survival strategy.

Interviewed by Adam Burroughs | Smart Business Magazine | INSIGHTS Digital Transformation

The typical data collection process within companies is often fraught with challenges. Just the magnitude of it can create issues when it comes to formatting, reading and interpreting data. And data can also quickly become dated either because of issues with the consistency of collection or where visibility relies on manual entry.

"Companies often make real-time decisions based upon reports comprised of old, "stale" data," says Mike Fieseler, vice president of business development at EOX Vantage. "That's akin to managing in the rearview mirror."

Fortunately, there are now a variety of ways to automate gathering and consolidating that data. 

Every business needs a system to help run day-to-day operations. Managing General Agencies (MGAs) in the insurance industry often select a platform in the software category of Agency Management Systems (AMS). An AMS provides a robust suite of tools to help insurers manage work functions and processes all up and down the policy lifecycle and throughout the enterprise.

The transportation industry experienced a rough 2020. It got hit harder than many other sectors of the economy, as the pandemic caused problems up and down the supply chain. Going into 2021, according to a recent survey, the top concerns for motor carriers are driver compliance, driver shortages and driver retention.