Perspective

If you had an extra $2 million to spend on your fleet, what would you do with it? I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that most fleet owners would earmark the cash for capital expenditures or personnel development.

While the above titled retention activity at first makes as much sense as trying to melt the sun, its logic is based on the following facts:

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration finally released the long-awaited electronic logging device mandate’s final rule in December. The rule states that motor carriers without a current solution in place now have until December 2017 to implement ELDs for any vehicle or combination of vehicles with an actual weight and/or Gross Vehicle Weight Rating of 10,001 pounds or more. The rule is meant to improve compliance with hours-of-service safety rules.

In 1994, Congress wrote a bill authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. In addition to keeping our skies safe, that bill laid down an important principle for our industry: that the federal government — not individual states — should write rules for interstate trucking.

The people who constitute the trucking industry are among the best examples of the American work ethic — they come to work every day focused on being a driver for the North American economy. Meeting them has been one of the great joys I’ve experienced while traveling across the United States.

Since May 2014 and the introduction of the new medical examiner system, more than 150,000 drivers have left the transportation industry due to medical ineligibility.

The trucking industry is searching for ways to alleviate what has become a national epidemic that apparently is growing — the driver shortage. But this problem may not be solved without tackling the enormous elephant in the room, which is costly for drivers and fleets: driver downtime and detention.

Not much has changed since the 1970s when, as a young technology marketer, I stood on the docks of countless trucking companies for hours, sometimes days, clipboard in hand, trying to measure the time and efficiency of dock management. Armed with data laboriously collected, I would confront trucking executives with the evidence that I thought would persuade them to invest in the latest technology of the day to automate wherever they could.

A lot of competing financial issues face transportation companies, but unfortunately, not all of these needs are within your control

In the world of transportation, change is something we deal with every day. It becomes a challenge to manage customer demands, the regulatory landscape, positive driver experiences and big data while promoting an organizational culture that is ready to accommodate the changes happening in front of us.