Advancing technologies, digitalization and disruptive innovation are significantly transforming the transportation and fleet maintenance industries. The challenge is how to prepare to ride the enduring waves of metamorphosis.

Disruption is driving significant industry change

July 11, 2016
Organizations best prepared will be able to endure and succeed in the Age of Disruption.

We are experiencing the acceleration of change and are being relentlessly affected by what has been dubbed the Age of Disruption. Advanced technologies are driving innovations that are bringing about significant and permanent change to disorderly life, business and the global economy.

This is the most rapid time of technological transformation ever, especially with regard to information. The role of digital, mobile and telematics technologies – which are being adopted at an unprecedented rate – is rapidly shifting from being a driver of marginal efficiency to an enabler of fundamental innovation and disruption.

This is having a massive impact on both the transportation and fleet maintenance industries.

Digital Disruption

Digitalization is the cause of large-scale and sweeping transformations across multiple aspects of business. At the same time, it is representing a major source of risk.

Some industries have been much more impacted. The world’s largest taxi company – Uber – doesn’t own any taxis. The world’s largest movie house – Netflix – owns no cinemas. The largest accommodation provider – Airbnb – owns no real estate. The world’s most valuable retailer – Alibaba – has no inventory.

Vehicles

Think about all that is going on within the trucking and vehicle maintenance industries. The Internet of Things (IoT) – a network of smart devices, sensors and the Cloud that allows the physical world and computer systems to interact directly, coupled with the proliferation of mobile sensors, is improving the efficiency and reliability of commercial vehicles.

Manufacturers are accelerating their use of robots and automation in U.S. factories, and that is boosting productivity.

Highways are becoming intelligent and automated. There is the pioneering of autonomous (self-driving) vehicles and the testing of delivery drones.

At the Los Angeles marine-cargo facility, autonomous carriers are currently being used to move containers across the wharf and deliver them to waiting trucks and trains, and autonomous technology is being used to double the speed of loading and unloading container ships.

Then there is artificial intelligence and the evolution of cognitive computing – self-learning systems that use data mining, knowledge representation and reasoning and natural language processing to mimic the way the human brain works. Think IBM’s cognitive computing system Watson. It “takes in” questions, searches its repository for information, develops and analyzes hypotheses and produces answers that are in natural language form.

Blue-Sky Thinking

Nowadays, we are constantly running full speed just to try and keep up. There never seems to be time for considering where the acceleration of change is taking our industries and how we might cope with it.

Yet, the only way for an organization to remain viable and thrive is to plan for the future. As a former boss told me: “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”

Naturally, none of us has the ability to foresee the future. Nevertheless, we can think abstractly and employ creative thinking skills and behaviors to imagine what the future might look like and then conceive future business scenarios.

Within 14 Years

Some projections of what could be by 2030 are offered in the book, Clean Disruption of Energy & Transportation, written by Tony Seba, an instructor at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program. Among them:

- All new mass-market vehicles will be electric.

- All of these vehicles will be autonomous or semi-autonomous.

- Up to 80 percent of highways will not be needed.

- Up to 80 percent of parking spaces will not be needed.

- The concept of individual car ownership will be obsolete.

Ponder the probable consequences that could arise from these five factors alone.

If you aren’t already doing so, I highly recommend that you regularly block out time to brainstorm about how to deal with the disruptive innovations and advanced technologies that are bringing about significant and permanent change to our industries and organizations. The better prepared you are, the more you and your organization will be able to adapt and prosper.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

About the Author

David A. Kolman | Contributor - Fleet Maintenance

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