The day’s work, spread across the trucks the company owns.
A board of the day’s pickups, deliveries and container moves, put onto trucks and drivers by a person. The field app is the other end of it: scanning, photographs, signatures, and a queue that holds the scan when there is no signal.
This is the switch for a company that owns trucks. A company that hires them instead will find the screen it needs already in SCM, and should not have to buy anything to get it.
It shows the jobs that are still not on a truck.
That is the whole purpose of a dispatch board at half past nine in the morning. It is not a map or a plan for the week, but the short list of work that has nobody’s name against it while there is still time to fix that.
| Job | Type | Where | Truck and driver | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PU-40218 | Pickup | Vernon CA | T-04 · R. Delgado | Done 09:12photo + signature |
| DL-40255 | Delivery | Commerce CA | T-04 · R. Delgado | On truck |
| PU-40261 | Pickup | Carson CA | T-07 · A. Nguyen | On truck |
| CN-40266 | Container return | USLAX | T-11 · J. Marek | On truckTCNU4419063 — detention running |
| DL-40263 | Delivery | Compton CA | — | Unassigned |
| PU-40270 | Pickup | Torrance CA | — | Unassigned |
| DL-40272 | Delivery | Gardena CA | — | Unassigned |
The other end is in somebody’s hand.
Eleven screens in the driver’s app. Barcodes are read by the phone’s own scanner where it has one and by a fallback where it does not, so the app works on the handset the driver already owns rather than on a device bought for the purpose.
Proof of delivery is three things
A photograph, a signature and a position, attached to the job, rather than a tick box that says delivered. When a customer asks in November where their pallet was left, the answer is a picture of the place it was left.
The queue that holds it
Yards and dock doors have no signal. Scans and PODs taken there are held on the phone and sent when there is a connection, so a delivery that happened at 11:04 is recorded as 11:04 rather than as whenever the driver next drove past a mast.
Hiring trucks is not an extension. Dispatching them is.
Most forwarders own no trucks at all. Putting the screen those companies need behind a switch they have to buy would be charging the majority for the minority’s problem, so the split was made the other way round.
Hired trucks — that is in SCM
The road leg sits on the shipment as one of SCM’s five modules. The driver is sent a link, and waiting time becomes a charge line on that shipment so it reaches the invoice and the job’s profit. Nothing on this page is needed for that, and nothing on this page is charged for it.
Owned trucks — that is Dispatch
The company’s own vehicles and drivers, a day that has to be divided between them, and an app in the cab that reports back. It is a different job with a different screen, and it is a switch because many companies do not need it.
A dispatch board, and not a fleet system.
One real day, across the trucks the company has.
One real day is laid out on the board and split across the company’s vehicles, and a pickup is run through the app on the attendee’s own phone — scan, photograph, signature — with the phone in aeroplane mode so that the queue can be seen holding it. A company that hires its trucking is shown the SCM screen instead and advised not to buy this extension.