PrivateFleets.com

This week, I have been researching and writing about “web services,” for an upcoming article in CCJ magazine. During this time, I’ve spoken with several people who have made some very compelling arguments about why fleets–particularly private and dedicated operations that share information within a fairly tight network of customers–are moving towards web services.

Everyone knows the fax machine and telephone are inefficient ways to conduct business. Using the Internet for e-mail and logging in to various websites to find loads, post equipment or conduct transactions, such as manage fuel transactions, is not really that much more efficient. The Internet is a far more efficient tool when used as the backbone for web services.

A lot of what I know about the value of web services I learned from Ben Becker, chief information officer of Tradewinds, a trucking company based in Carmel, Ind. Becker writes a fascinating trucking technology blog at www.truckingnerd.com, which I mentioned in a previous posting. He uses web services extensively, which I will explain in more detail in the next issue of CCJ.

Web services is a mechanism for exchanging data and automating transactions among different information systems. It uses a universal computer language called XML for eXtensible Markup Language, to describe and structure the data to be exchanged in a file. Web services also uses the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to encode XML files to make them “readable” by any operating system–Mac, Windows, AS400, etc. In other words, XML is used to tag data and SOAP is used to transfer data.

While it may sound complicated, any computer programmer or IT person on your staff will know what web services are. Anyone will say the benefit of XML web services is the simplicity of being able to abstract and access data from one information system and read and write this data to other systems.

A web service from one computer program can be embedded into the computer code of a second application. The second application is said to “consume” the web service. In essence, a web service allows one machine to ask another machine a specific question and get a succinct answer.

So, what impact do web services have for the trucking industry? Plenty, and their impact is growing fast. Increasingly, information must be exchanged among different systems–internally and among your supply chain partners–in real time, and synchronized with all the important events that surround the physical movement of your freight and assets.

Take for example the process of sharing information about your trucks to find a backhaul. Rather than visit various websites, web services allows you to integrate the functions of posting trucks and searching for matches directly into your dispatch or transportation management software. I recently spoke with a freight broker, for example, that uses web services to automatically post loads and find matches in TransCore’s 3sixty Freight Matching service–formerly called DAT Services. TransCore offers a service called Connexion, which enables its customers to write their own software interfaces to its freight matching service, using XML web services.

The same concept could apply to private fleets who, instead of visiting a website to search for backhauls, could incorporate a web service from TransCore into their dispatch software. With a click of a button from their dispatch screen, they could transmit all the pertinent capacity information–such as location of a truck, equipment type, etc.–into TransCore’s freight matching service.

I also spoke to Dave Mook, chief technology officer for TMW Systems, a major dispatch software provider. He said that in 5 years, he anticipates that the majority of TMW customers, which include a significant number of dedicated and private fleet operations, will be using XML web services to exchange data with their supply chain partners. Today, XML accounts for about 2 percent of the volume of information–load tenders, shipment status and invoices–their fleet customers exchange with their own customers. EDI (electronic data interchange) accounts for the rest. Mook said that one fleet, Cardinal Logistics, which operates dedicated fleets, already uses XML exclusively with some customers to exchange information more efficiently and fluidly than EDI can provide.

Although you may not have heard–or care–about the value of XML web services today, expect to see a significant growth in the number of carriers using it to streamline their business processes and share information with their customers. If you currently are using XML web services in your operations somehow, I would love to hear from you and get a conversation started about how to increase the adoption rate of this exciting technology among private fleets–especially if you regularly search for backhauls, and would like to try to automate this process.