We asked three contributing business leaders – What technology is helping to transform your industry and how?
Brandon Bodine, Vice President, Navajo Expedited
“I would say that for Navajo Expedited, being one of the early adopters to welcome customer tracking tools like Macro Point or FourKites has gone a long way to ease any concerns that customers have about using our owner-operator partners. One of the primary concerns we hear from customers is their ability to have real-time tracking on all their shipments. We have been able to provide them this access whether their shipment is on a Navajo company-owned truck or one of our owner-operator partners. Whether it’s tying directly into our owner-operator’s ELD (electronic logging device) or using mobile/cellular tracking, we always have a way to provide our customers real-time tracking. This is something all customers want, but many of our competitors have been reluctant to invest in the tools needed to provide the service, or just lacked the technology to get the job done. We invested early in this technology, and it has certainly paid off for us.”
Carter Kramer, President, CellSite Solutions
“For CellSite Solutions, it is both the technology related to converting fuels with hydrogen, as well as lithium extraction. It is one thing to have a lot of electricity, all this generation of renewable power, but there is a big gap when it comes to the way that this power is going to be stored. One of the primary methods of this energy storage is using batteries, and the limiting factor of batteries is lithium. If you go all the way down the industry, chain lithium extraction is probably one of the most important areas, and I think that that is going to have the biggest impact.”
Phillip Goodwin, Chief Technology Officer, PSS Industrial Group
“There are many; robotic process automation (RPA) and custom code automation to rebalance inventory network and manual tedious processes, point of sale graphical user interface (GUI) front-end to speed up quote to invoice for every order, optical character recognition and machine learning (ML) to automate accounts payable, and cloud-based servers to enable flexibility. Security and disaster recovery, fully integrated e-commerce solutions to enable additional shopping channels for our customers, Microsoft Teams and other virtual platforms to remotely diagnose and remedy customer equipment challenges. Various security software packages to protect PSS Industrial and reducing the likelihood of phishing attacks, custom coded tools and calculators for customer self-service, and statistical code languages to evaluate, learn and recommend pricing. And finally fleet tracking, monitoring and dispatch to optimize delivery routes. Each of these are revolutionary in the industry.”
