TMW’s Wangler Calls for More Emphasis on Technical Skills in Modern Education
David Wangler, president of transportation management software provider TMW Systems, called last week for more emphasis on technical skills in education and praised the skills of truck drivers, even as self-driving trucks are being developed.
Speaking at the opening session of TMW’s TransForum conference in Orlando, Florida, on Sept. 14, Wangler deplored the trend in modern education away from technical training.
“The effects of trying to funnel every student towards a four-year college degree, regardless of aptitude or market opportunity, are starting to be seen everywhere,” Wangler said. “Companies looking for machinists, mechanics, plumbers and electricians — the folks who know how to make and fix things — are struggling” while too many college graduates end up with jobs in the retail food industry.
That trend has contributed to the national shortage of truck drivers and maintenance technicians, Wangler said. “Truck driving and vehicle mechanics are classic skilled labor roles,” he said.
“We wish Daimler all the best with their self-driving truck project and Google with its autonomous cars, but the realities of traffic in North America will require drivers behind the wheel of tractor-trailers for a long time to come,” Wangler said.
At the same time, “it is likely that autonomous driving technology will provide us with improvements in the driving environment itself, reducing many of the physical job challenges of sitting for hours and maintaining mental alertness over long hauls on lonely roads,” Wangler said.
He predicted that in addition to truck platooning, “we will see ‘autonomous singles’ on the road. Perhaps after a long day of picks or drops, the driver will be able to enter a dedicated autonomous truck lane on I-80 and rest up in the sleeper while the truck covers a few hundred miles.”
Wangler also extolled advancements in TMW’s product line that, he said, make them more useful and efficient.
Many of those gains, he said, are derived from effective use of data and his company’s ability, due to its size, to analyze data to innovate product lines.
“Data is the fuel for analytics, and it’s no wonder that companies spend a great deal of time gathering, organizing and preparing data before they create a single pivot table or chart,” Wangler said. “Without good data, there’s nothing to analyze.
“The power of big data lies in the ability to identify those relationships and patterns that may not be obvious in smaller data samples,” he said. “If we shine the light across a larger cross-section of industry data and those patterns persist, we can gain new insights about driving our performance levels to greater heights.”
The company introduced a variety of new services and product enhancements at its conference, which ran through Sept. 16. Tools for brokers, trucking operations, streamlined back-office procedures and freight management were among the software products presented at the three-day conference for TMW customers.
TMWSuite Brokerage software added rating support of truckload and less-than-truckload shipments that the company said improves customers’ ability to accurately rate shipments and offer more competitive price quotes.
TMW Operations’ new features include commodity-based loading guidance to maximize equipment utilization along with enhanced cross-dock capability to facilitate planning, execution and billing of “turnpike doubles” movements.
The company’s Back Office program offered improved support for agent-based pay scenarios, which enables companies to grow business using an agent model and an automated, “no-touch” processing of billing and settlements to reduce the manual effort required to complete critical tasks.
In addition, TMW Suite added features for less-than-truckload consolidators who incorporate rail service, including rail reservation and drayage capabilities. Route optimization powered by Appian DirectRoute automatically routes daily deliveries and identifies optimal truck assignments for new pickups as they are called in during the day.
Other new products and en-hancements include a redesigned TruckMate solution for managing cross-dock freight, improved driver scheduling and tariff rate import for TL2000, integration to mobile communications pro-viders, fuel-card and fuel-purchase system providers for users of Innovative IES software, enhanced Appian software, a mobile tire analyzer application for TMW Asset Maintenance software and new capabilities for TMW’s ExpertFuel optimization software.
