How to Develop a Transportation Mobile App
The transportation industry is always on the go — moving across vast geographical areas and usually dispersed across the globe.
Their nature of work is, by definition, mobile.
Recent advancements in mobile technologies enable such companies to create custom solutions to meet their specific requirements.
In the early days, the transportation sector used mainly navigation and location-based services with mobile apps. But as of recently, the mobile applications for transportation companies include traffic data collection, travel information, route planning, ridesharing, etc.
Smartphones have several built-in technologies (high-resolution cameras, scanners, GPS capabilities, memory power, RFID, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and more) which can integrate with others, thus mobiles today can fully support modern apps for transportation business.
Most business sectors have utilized mobile apps in running their business and the transportation sector didn’t fall behind. Nowadays, transportation companies can run a successful and efficient organization with the help of a mobile applications.
To create a successful transportation app, you need to consider the following features:
Offline Support
This is a world of Internet and not having it seems almost impossible today.
However, your company needs to be prepared for the eventual absence of Internet connectivity especially that a lot of transportation business takes place on the road.
If your app doesn’t offer offline support, it’ll be useless at certain locations. Problems in transportation work process like last-mile problems can impact the end-user and affect the business.
However, if you include offline support in your app, it can help employees to enter data into the app when they’re able to; being online or not.
Offline support enables upload of information automatically — it ensures your employees will complete the task they’ve been assigned in the required timeframe.
Driver and Vehicle Tracking
The most important thing in freight industry is locating the whereabouts of the vehicles, drivers and the cargo.
Today’s smartphones can enable it with technologies such as GPS, location-based services LBS, and Telematics to track moving vehicles globally with real-time updated data, history and communication.
This way, your head admin can monitor the activities of your vehicles on Google Maps or other Map services to track the route and sync it with your main system.
You, as an admin, can assign the tasks for your employees, and your drivers will receive a push notification with the instructions. Throughout the work process, the location of the driver, vehicle and the cargo is visible to you on the map of your smartphone.
Such enhanced visibility will surely improve productivity and increase work efficiency along with the safety of your staff.
Shipment Tracking
Shipment tracking feature allows you to log carrier and delivery information and generally helps to track the shipment. This can be done manually or you can enable automatic upload option for your needs.
When the cargo reaches the admin, it compares whether the information matches the initial input that was provided at the time it was assigned to the driver.
The problem that arises for transportation companies is to find mobile apps that support all these features and that is the primary reason why developing a custom mobile app for transportation companies have become a necessity.
With the rise of the Internet of Things, these companies need a logistics management app that can allow employees to attach photos, documents, and even barcodes and thus simplify the data collection process.
Driver / Job Log
This feature helps drivers or employees to keep a daily log of activities — recording the mileage traveled, number of pickups and deliveries and the details of the same, total hours of work done, vehicle health, etc.
Your staff can record such information by mobile forms or other features in real-time without doing too much data entry.
Using the customized app, drivers and other staff can obtain real-time data and update the admin panel for further analysis which will help job accountability and efficiency. It also enables transparent work process with inputs on/off duty, sleeper berth, any remarks, etc.
This feature can be a practical way to maintain the integrity of the goods you’re handling as well as your company assets.
Route Planning
In the past, fleet managers had to assign the tasks to the drivers and other staff by constantly keeping in touch with them via phones or messages on the web, if enabled. All this seems complicated from today’s point of view.
Now, with GPS enabled mobile apps, the entire process is updated by a real-time interface with Map display capabilities.
You can show your entire route on the live Map and assign a timeline for each destination point. Instant notifications can deliver you messages regarding changes or updates within the routes or tasks.
If you pay attention to traffic and forecasts of road and rail authorities, you can easily change your routes to avoid any delays, improve productivity and save additional costs on fuel.
The overall efficiency is improved within daily activities and deals with any eventual emergencies along the way.
Payroll Management
Going mobile can greatly help other sectors in the transportation industry — replacing the old-fashioned manual data entry with mobile timesheets seems like a breakthrough.
A mobile app can record the log-in and log-out inputs, job hours and data entries.
GPS-location stamps ease calculations regarding working and overtime hours — your employees can automate the entire payroll and expenses with the help of a mobile app and avoid unnecessary discrepancies or errors.
Benefits of a transportation mobile app:
- You can better manage your fleet — you can trace the movements of your fleet which helps to automate the entire fleet management process. No more phone calls back and forth, plus you can better manage your employees. Your business supply chain is improved with easily tracked vehicles in real-time and enabled instant communication with your staff.
- Time management is everything in transportation — since traffic is one of the major reasons why deliveries are late, it’s clear why transportation companies need to be aware of the traffic situation at all times. As we can be connected to the Internet 24/7, a mobile app is able to deliver such information and provide actual data updates about the traffic situation in real-time which aids your employees who are on the road.
- People who work in the transportation industry for a long time remember the headache when managing inventory takes place — the old way of inventory was expensive and extremely time consuming and that’s where a mobile app comes in and saves the day. With a mobile app, you can keep track of your company assets simply and easily plus you will get more time to focus on important parts of your business and fewer things to worry about.
- Tracing cargo — the first thing you know is that you have to monitor your cargo movements — meaning what type of cargo is being transported in which trucks. The mobile app simplifies the process with the usage of QR code or RFID or NFC technologies. QR code is the easiest way as you just need to scan the code for each item using your smartphone — all you need is a camera on your smartphone. The other technique, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) uses the frequency or the radio waves for scanning the goods. With RFID, you have active and passive tags (tags are fixed to a chip or an antenna) where active tags have tracking capability of around 100 meters whilst passive have only 25 meters. NFC or Near Field Technology is based on the same technique as RFID but the difference is in the distance. NFC tags must be placed in very close proximity with the scanner so it cannot scan all goods.
- Less paperwork — instead of spending hours doing paperwork, a mobile app reduces paperwork to a minimum with digital form fills, submissions and easy access to documents. The data is easily entered into the app and then submitted further instead of the good old ‘snail way’. You can add more features within such mobile apps like a rich dashboard, digital reports, order delivery confirmation, task scheduling, etc. Not only it saves a lot of time but it also eliminates the risk of important documents being misplaced or worse, lost.
- Online booking — once upon a time, if you wanted to get something shipped out, you would need to do a great deal of work to complete the task. Being able to complete an online booking is a great asset for your transportation or freight company as it’s entered into the mobile app and easily synced with your main system — as we already said many times, our world is MOBILE and people are more prone to use smartphones to complete any task, whether business or private. Keep that in mind when designing the app.
- Post-delivery information — the delivery of goods becomes a hassle-free process with the usage of a mobile app. No more last-mile problems as all you need to do is to scan the goods’ ID and enter the details such as time of delivery, location, and quantity. Monitoring inputs and outputs by your delivery staff are simplified allowing them to update the information in the app by sending delivery alerts.
- Cashless system — no more paper form invoices or calculating cash amount since online payment system can be implemented in tracking and delivery apps to facilitate the entire process. You can choose the most suitable payment system as per your users’ preferences as there are different types of payment.
FINAL WORD
The mobile app for transportation industry doesn’t cost as much as not having one — utilizing a mobile app can be a great benefit not only to your company and employees who can carry out their duties more easily, but also to your customers as you can build trust which will lead to boost of your company’s credibility.
Mobile app is an investment which will make you stand out from the rest of your competitors.
