Fleet Finance, IT Managers Set Joint Meeting; Will Explore Efficiency, Looming Tax Changes

Trucking managers in information technology and finance will meet jointly in Tampa, Fla., next month to explore opportunities for efficiency improvement through IT and strategies for handling significant tax changes expected at the end of 2012.

American Trucking Associations is organizing the June 11-13 event for members of two of its councils: the Information Technology & Logistics Council and the National Accounting & Finance Council. ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello and political pollster Neil Newhouse will speak on separate days to joint sessions.

“This is important because it is geared specifically toward people who work in IT in the freight transportation industry,” said ITLC Chairman Don Smith, who is IT director for the enterprise services unit of Con-way Inc. “There will be a session on Lean/Six Sigma issues from manufacturing and their applicability for trucking. This helps with continuous improvement in processes.”

“There are key changes possibly to be made on taxation, finance and risk management at the end of this year,” said Warren Hoemann, ATA senior vice president for industry affairs, referring to the expiration of the Bush administration tax cuts on Dec. 31.

While most reports have focused on changes in personal income tax rates, Hoemann said there also will be changes in corporate tax rates, credits and deductions.

“On the federal budget side, there is also the issue of spending sequestration, which will affect ATA members who haul health-care products and freight for the Defense Department,” Hoemann said.

The NAFC program will feature a debate on funding transportation infrastructure with a vehicle-mileage tax. Hoemann said ATA opposes VMTs, but it is important to discuss the issue because the policy has significant support in some quarters.

NAFC also will look at driver insurability and how that has been affected by the federal Compliance, Safety, Accountability program and the hours-of-service rule change that is coming.

Terry Croslow, chief financial officer of Bestway Express, has been the NAFC chairman.

The meeting is also of benefit for certified public accountants, Hoemann said, because they can gain needed credits for continuing professional education by attending.

ITLC’s Smith said other sessions of note on the technology side concern data warehousing and mining, electronic data interchange, social media and trucking, and tech team roundtables.

The roundtables allow trucking IT managers to talk among themselves and with vendors about topics such as hardware and infrastructure, wireless communication and vehicle telematics, network architecture and business processes.

For data warehousing and mining, Smith said, trucking companies can store extraordinary quantities of information once they give up paper, and then they can put the data to work, whether they are stored in-house on servers or with a “cloud computing” arrangement.

“Warehousing allows you to look at data relationships that might not be intuitively obvious, but then important relationships can jump out at you,” Smith said.