Supply Chain Brain - October/November 2011

supply chain. With our partners, we work
hard to develop products and solutions that
will meet needs of those customers.
Q: How do you do that?
Lieberthal: The important aspect of
that is to truly understand what those needs
are. Before we can build solutions or manu-
facture technology devices, we need to fully
understand and invest our time and resources
into understanding those customers. We’ve
been very successful at that.
Q: Let’s narrow the focus to the transporta-
tion industry. What are the issues you see
challenging it today?
Lieberthal: Let’s settle on three to
begin with. The first one would be what’s on
top of everyone’s mind: the price of fuel. It’s
not just the cost of fuel that is important but
the volatility of the price of fuel. Customers
can plan their business if the price is what
they expect it to be. It’s the volatility that really
drives them crazy. What we need to do is to
look at that because companies will end up
charging customers and end user surcharges
based on the price of fuel.
The second issue we’re facing more and
more is compliance with regulations. This has
to do with driver regulations, more specifi-
cally the hours of service. If drivers are only
allowed to be out delivering for a certain
number of hours a day that will lead to lower
productivity because a driver can’t be out as
long. That adds a higher cost to the system.
We need to look at ways to increase the ability
of drivers to take better advantage of their
asset and of the time they are allowed to be
out there.
The third issue is service of the customer.
Transportation is all about service whether for
private fleet or for hire. It’s all about getting
product to the right place at the right time. We
have to be able to provide customers visibility
to what they are expecting. The best way to
do that, obviously, is to be able to provide
real-time solutions and having devices and
technology in the hands of that critical person
who’s doing the actual delivery at that time.
Q: More specifically, what solutions?
Lieberthal: What we’ve seen over the
last couple of years is development of solu-
tions that were siloed. We have been driven to
work with our partner community to provide
integrated solutions to these problems. If they
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