Back in the old days, a carrier’s data belonged to the carrier.  We’re talking about tracking equipment, primarily the truck.  Satellite tracking then, cell phones or on-board units using cell service today.  What has changed is access to the data.

With the advent of service companies like FourKites, MacroPoint, and 10-4 Systems, data regarding the truck’s location is made available to the owners of the shipments, the shipper.  How?  The carrier provides a skinny data file to the service company (say FourKites) with the shipper name, shipment ID, and truck number.  If necessary, the file will also include the drivers cell phone number.  With this skinny file, the service company will ping the on-board device database (i.e. Omnitracs, Rand McNally, etc.) to gather the location data, then report it to the shipping customer.  If no on-board device exists, then the driver’s cell phone will be pinged for the current location.  Either way, the service company can report the location of all shipments to the shipping customer in near real time (ok every 15 minutes, but not bad).

Some carriers will ask, why do the shippers have to know exactly where the truck is? To update a nice visual on a computer screen?   This may be round one.  Round two is focused on predicting a shipment’s arrival to its destination.  Not 100% as of this posting, but it’s in the works.

You may wonder, can’t carriers simply pass this data directly to their shipping customers?  Of course they can, and they do.  But that is a lot for a shipper to coordinate, especially if they work with lots of carriers.  Some shippers do exactly that, but others now have the option of using a service company as described above.  Makes for a one stop shopping, convenient approach.

But back to the carrier.  Will drivers submit to being tracked all the time?  Do they have a choice?  Given the current high turnover of truckload trucking, this latest trend will likely not help the situation.  But as with all process changes, people learn to adapt.