Haulage drivers understand the realities of competitive business pressures more than most. While businesses across all sectors have incentives to adjust and improve practices, hauliers are especially vulnerable to technological and regulatory changes. In this article, we’ll explore how one company in particular is quickly changing the transport industry.
What is Amazon culture?
The phrase might conjure up images of the Brazilian rainforest, or even fictional characters like Wonder Woman. If you’re struggling to see how these would be relevant to the business interests of haulage drivers, don’t worry – Amazon culture, also called the Amazon effect, refers to the impact of the multibillion-pound mega-corporation.
In short, when a company this wildly popular offers next and even same-day delivery on a wide variety of products, customer expectations change radically. And businesses that don’t adapt to meet these expectations risk losing out significantly.
Here, we’ll examine both the effects of Amazon’s success and how the transport and logistics industry is responding to these effects.
Efficiency
Efficiency is always crucial to anyone doing delivery work, but higher expectations created by super-fast deliveries of online orders massively increase the premium clients place on efficiency.
In addition to needing to complete jobs faster, hauliers must also provide an increasingly familiar, regularised service. Multinational corporations such as Amazon encourage customers to expect easy to follow, uniform processes. Smaller firms might lament the decline of personal, individual connections, but that won’t change the fact that most in the transport sector will have to adapt to meet clients’ demands.
Crucially, delivery workers will have to follow rules and meet strict criteria, and managers will have to gather and respond to accurate, precise data to devise realistic, achievable and effective practices.
Strategic Routing
The standard industry model for a long time involved simple a-to-b routes, with HGVs ideally completing deliveries on their return journeys too. But increased customer desire for flexibility means that businesses now need to make use of multiple drop-off points and depots. On top of this, environmental pressures are also increasing the need to use smaller and alternative vehicles for last-mile work.
The upshot of this is that, ideally, fewer miles will be wasted, with haulage drivers able to complete jobs on each stage of their route. The downside is that these sorts of routes are much more complex to plan and follow.
New Technology
The need to make more complex deliveries faster creates demand among businesses for new technology to help them manage increasingly complicated routes. While innovation has always created pressure to adapt, Amazon’s prevalence has made carrying on with outdated tech increasingly untenable. This is especially crucial as Amazon is making big, well publicised investments in fast-developing areas such as drones.
This means transport companies must invest in new and better technology, for instance using telematics data to improve their ability to react to changing conditions on the roads. Haulage drivers themselves will also increasingly need to be able to work with new technologies.
It is hard to see how much further changes in deliveries could go. But this shouldn’t be cause for complacency. Who, after all, predicted the mammoth success of a delivery model like Amazon’s, and its impact across the board and around the world? Managers and hauliers alike should take care to keep a close eye on changes – and always be ready to adapt.
Norman Dulwich is a Correspondent for Haulage Exchange, the leading online trade network for the road transport industry. Connecting professionals across the UK and Europe through their website, Haulage Exchange provides services for matching a haulage drivers with jobs in road transport and haulage work, and is now the fastest growing Freight Exchange in the UK.
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