April/May 2003

Integrating mobile data and scheduling with your existing IT infrastructure can be a challenge, but it's smoothed if the suppliers have paved the way for you. Peter Rowlands reports

Suppose you run a fleet of vehicles, and decide you want to put in a mobile data system. Maybe you want to retrieve proof of delivery details in real time, or enable drivers to access your corporate database.

Fine; so your drivers get handheld terminals, and you get the ability to transmit data to and from them. But how do you actually integrate all this with your existing transport management system? It's another layer of technology to implement, and another potential source of hassle.

Or what if you already have a good transport management system, and decide to add a separate routing and scheduling capability? Once again, you could have an integration task to contend with.

 

It's to tackle challenges like these that suppliers increasingly tend to work together in what they term "partnerships". End users still get the benefits of the original specialised systems, but these are preconfigured to work together, so the integration issues go away. In a nutshell, it's what "best of breed" is all about.

Last year Traderman Systems, supplier of the long-established FreightDesk transport management system, announced such arrangements with two other suppliers - Controlforce for mobile data, and Kingswood MapMechanics for routing and scheduling. We talked to the three companies to find out a bit more about how this works in practice.

Mary Short, managing director of Kingswood MapMechanics, sums up the logic succinctly when she says: "People are often in a hurry when they put in new systems, and may find they don't work as expected. Strategic partnerships aim to take away that uncertainty."

Edward Burt, managing director of Controlforce, adds: "We actively pursue strategic partnerships to maintain our position as a leading developer of mobile technology."

Shaun Coghlin, managing director of Traderman Systems, says the partnerships were prompted by a growing awareness of potential customer demand. On the mobile data, for instance, he says: "The cost of data communications has come down, and developments like GPRS and affordable Pocket PCs is making mobile data much more attractive. Customers are beginning to express interest, and we wanted to offer a complete package to them."

On the routing and scheduling side, he says the company has already had a number of enquiries about adding this capability to FreightDesk; so a link with TruckStops, the system supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics, was a logical step.

Kingswood's Mary Short adds that although the two systems can be supplied separately and will still work together quite comfortably, on an integration "wish list" they would probably "only score ticks in 50 per cent of the tick boxes."

wider market appeal

A future objective for Traderman has been to give its FreightDesk system wider market appeal. It is already popular among transport operators; among new targets are manufacturers, who will often have an existing enterprise resource planning system in place. "ERP systems have not historically been strong on POD management," Coghlin says. "This development means they can use FreightDesk with their existing ERP, bringing with it a built-in POD capability."

Shared-user distribution companies should find attractions in the routing and scheduling capability, he says. "TruckStops is very good at this."

In practice, integrating these various systems doesn't seem to have caused the suppliers too much of a problem. Virtually no change has had to be made to the TruckStops product, Mary Short says. Yet it can now be accessed seamlessly through FreightDesk's Web-style interface. As Shaun Coghlin says: "It all happens in the background. To the user it looks like a single system."

Traderman for its part has had to make some changes to the FreightDesk system to work more closely with TruckStops, although they aren't too radical. For instance, it has added fields to its interface where operators can define sets of restrictions against resources. This means the data fed to TruckStops makes maximum use of its ability to work on the basis of "real availability".

What is significant is that although such interface modifications are straightforward enough for the supplier, they would be difficult or impossible for users to implement. "That's one good reason for the partnership approach," Shaun Coghlin says.

FreightDesk can also make calls to a system called TruckStops Roads, which allows users to print out maps to help drivers find delivery points. These are produced at a small scale to provide the context, and at a larger scale to give the detail.

On the mobile data side, Shaun Coghlin says one of the potential difficulties in any implementation is managing the software setup on remote devices. "So it's ideal to be able to draw on the experience of a mobile data specialist."

In the early days, he sees the mobile capability as "primarily a mechanism for POD gathering," although he points out that it can also work in the opposite direction, allowing drivers' manifests and mapping to be uploaded to mobile devices.

POD data doesn't have to be transferred back to base in real time; provision has been made for batch transfer from handheld units to FreightDesk via a docking cradle back at base. "But we're also offering a real-time capability," Coghlin says, pointing out that the Controlforce system can be network-independent, using GSM, GPRS or Transcomm to handle data communication.

To manage the integration, Traderman is using Controlforce's m-Go server technology as the gateway to its FreightDesk system. Coghlin describes the m-Go package as a toolkit giving Traderman mobile capabilities, and says the server is likely to be hosted by Traderman itself.

However, he adds that the cooperation between these two companies is also going further. "We're moving on the stage where we will actually be doing application design on the mobile side, while Controlforce will be cutting the code."

integration follows naturally

Just how compatible do systems have to be in the first place to work together in the way these three are doing? Informed users might note, for instance, that FreightDesk is primarily a Unix-based product, whereas TruckStops runs under Windows. Is that an issue?

They say emphatically not. Shaun Coghlin points out that FreightDesk has a Web-based user interface anyway, and is often implemented in PC environments. And Controlforce, like FreightDesk, uses an Oracle database.

In any case, the suppliers point out that what is being exchanged between systems is basically data. As long as the functionality is compatible between them, integration follows naturally. As Mary Short of Kingswood MapMechanics comments: "For partnerships to work, naturally you need a level of competence, but what really helps is if you have cultural synergy."

Shaun Coghlin adds that the integration offers the reassurance of "IT robustness", and says; "Since the dotcom distraction, robustness has been higher up users' priority lists."

It seems the partnership initiative is already bearing fruit. We understand that a vehicle operator in the high-security business is already planning to roll out mobile units to 50 vehicles, linking them with FreightDesk and also providing a tracking capability. Kingswood MapMechanics already has extensive experience of tracking, both through work with specialists in that market and with location-based services.

www.controlforce.co.uk

www.mapmechanics.com

www.traderman.co.uk