By Gary Brooks, Syncron
As the chief marketing officer for Syncron – a cloud-based aftermarket “service optimization” firm – Gary Brooks tries to stay close to changes that will affect global supply chains. And right now he sees several trends gaining steam that will impact trucking. “Today’s supply chain has become more complicated than ever,” he said. “The supply chain is in one of the most disruptive periods ever and trucking is one industry that is feeling these changes in a big way.” In this guest column, Brooks highlight four of what he thinks will be the biggest disruptors of trucking in the years ahead.
Well, 2018 is finally upon us, and if 2017 was any sort of indication, the new year is going to be another hectic one for the trucking industry
It will be rife with new technology and business strategies that will shake-up the industry – especially when it comes to coping with after-sales and manufacturing needs.
With that in mind, here are four topics the trucking industry needs to keep in mind moving forward.
- Driverless Trucks and the Trucking Workforce
With companies such as
Google and
Tesla already investing in driverless technologies, fully
autonomous vehicles are here to stay. As driverless trucks become more of a real possibility, human operators could shift more into a supervisory role, opposed to on-board operations. Product uptime will become more crucial than ever, as the “in-use” hours of trucks could increase. Additionally, upwards of
upwards of 95% of traffic accidents occur because of human error. So relying more on automated driving could reduce this number dramatically – while helping keep existing commercial vehicles up and running.