Dive Brief:
- IBM's Weather Company has debuted its Operations Dashboard for Ground Transportation, a dashboard platform that utilizes custom APIs for delivering real-time weather forecasts for drivers, dispatchers and distribution-center managers, Overdrive reported.
- The benefit of the weather API is in its specifics that target potential transportation delays. Knowing in advance via push notification whether storms or other dangerous weather await will help save time and add safety via advance reroutes.
- The dashboard is customizable for each fleet it serves, and addresses road conditions, precipitation levels, wind, fog, ice and pooling water. It also provides up to the moment traffic flow, accident or incident information, and warns of safety hazards.
Dive Insight:
The new Operations Dashboard provides far more thoroughness than a simple phone app, which is good news for logistics planners and drivers. Advance alerts regarding sudden accidents or pending storms can shave minutes if not hours off a trip, sparing significant costly delays, always a concern in the era of the debate over Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs).
Because planning is at the heart of logistics, any platform that aids in ruling out disruptions is a welcome disruptor. With the Operations Dashboard being specially designed for ground transport, it can warn drivers of far more than the weather, even alerting them to rough roads or damaged byways via push notification. Trucks that follow a city route can benefit greatly from pooling water notices, particularly on streets under aging bridges prone to leakage. Ice too can be a sudden and highly dangerous condition, one that drivers must traverse carefully.
Ultimately the specificity of the new app is present because it is designed specifically for ground transport users, rather than general users. With weather and road conditions changing from region to region, an app that can move with a driver and his team is worth a lot more than a system requiring a reset every time a driver changes zones.