BoldIQ quoted in Fleetowner’s “Trump, trucking, and the outlook for 2017”
By: Sean Kilcarr in Trucks at Work
Lots of change may be on the menu for trucking in 2017 as economic trends and federal policy efforts could make further alterations to the U.S. freight market – everything from canceling regulations to the adoption of new strategies for meeting customer demands.
“When you move 70% of the nation’s domestic freight there are few issues out there that we are not a part of either directly or indirectly,” Chris Spear, president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations (ATA) trade group, explained in a recent phone interview with me. “Tax reform, trade, and infrastructure: we have a role to play in all of those issues.”
For starters, he noted that the 10-year $1 trillion infrastructure proposal put on the table by President-elect Trump could be a big positive for the industry in a number of ways.
“Infrastructure is our industry’s lifeblood: We need good infrastructure and getting such a package passed is key right out of the gate,” Spear said. “At least as proposed, that package will likely be tied to tax reform.”
Sandeep Kar, global vice president for mobility at Frost & Sullivan, added that few industries will face the impact — whether net positive or negative — of a Trump presidency as strongly as trucking, which is a leading indicator of economic activity and typically feels the effects of economic swings and fluctuations well before many other industries or sectors.
“While the effect of Trump administration’s legislative actions will be experienced primarily by the U.S. commercial vehicle industry, global market participants and markets will have much to note and consider,” he noted in a recent report.
Roei Ganzarski, a former Boeing executive and now CEO BoldIQ, which provides optimization software for asset scheduling, added another economic twist to trucking’s outlook where the economy is concerned: the rise of “demand-driven” freight transportation service.
“Consumers or customers want to get what they want, at the time and place they want it, and only want to ask for it [delivery service] when they are ready to ask and not before,” he explained to me recently. “Thus the transportation operator must be ‘demand-driven’ in order to serve such on-demand needs in an efficient manner that enables scale, growth, and profitability.”
That “on-demand economy” is also shortening planning cycles and significantly shortening decision making time frames. “This means the need for intelligent, data driven, and real-time decision making is critical,” especially in trucking, Ganzarski said.
He added that this “demand-driven” view assumes that trucking companies and other freight service providers have finite resources to do their work.
“This must be viewed differently from the so-called ‘sharing economy’ where an operation will use someone else’s resources because they are so inefficient, they have spare time or capacity on their resources,” Ganzarski pointed out.
That will lead to more consolidation and even elimination of some transport companies that cannot adapt fast enough to the change, he said.