Logistics is a team sport. Moving products from suppliers to the production line, warehouses, retailers, and the end customer takes a lot of coordination that goes way beyond just adding technology. For example, even with advanced transportation management and online freight brokerage services, booking transportation often requires making a phone call, or sending an email. These tedious manual processes significantly impact efficiency and introduce human error to logistics processes.
With Oracle Transportation Management, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM), organizations can automate many of these processes, but to further enhance efficiency and enable customers to automate scheduling, we need to be working on a common data model with third-party logistics providers and other related service providers.
To help solve this problem, we’ve joined the Scheduling Standards Consortium (SSC). In collaboration with organizations such as Arrive Logistics, Blue Yonder, Convoy, Coyote Logistics, e2open, Echo Logistics, J.B. Hunt, One Network Enterprises, and Uber Freight, our goal is to define the standards for APIs to enable streamlined sharing of scheduling information.
It’s going to require a collective effort and industry collaboration to achieve this goal. But the effort will ultimately enhance appointment booking and management, and improve processes for shippers, drivers, and receivers.
By selecting industry leaders to establish open standards for scheduling, the SSC is driving the freight industry closer to a standard framework for scheduling data. We’re excited to be joining this effort and look forward to the additional speed and accuracy that customers will gain access to as scheduling standards are established.
