Descartes Blog

Fleet management is often overlooked as companies examine ways to improve performance while keeping their costs down. But fleets can be a competitive differentiator for companies that compete on delivery service, if businesses take the correct approach to fleet management. Yet what shapes the thinking, strategies and tactics of the top performers? How are they leveraging rapidly evolving fleet technologies to improve the value of the fleet without prohibitively increasing costs?

Descartes went looking for those answers by surveying 130 companies with fleets across the globe to determine how leaders think differently and the results point to a definite linkage between management’s perceived value of the fleet and overall financial performance. We've compiled these results in a 55 minutes web seminar, recorded on Nov 30th, to provide you with a valuable opportunity to gain insights into the behavior of top performers, and to compare the results with your own organization’s perspective and performance.

The rapid global expansion that low-cost airline Norwegian has experienced is requiring the company to better engage with the wider air cargo community that can benefit from the bellyhold capacity in its expanding 787 Dreamliner fleet. To facilitate this higher level of engagement, Norwegian is using Descartes’ cloud-based Global Air Messaging Gateway solution to help standardize and automate electronic air cargo communication. 

Without a comprehensive omnichannel strategy that includes advanced parcel shipping capabilities, ecommerce retailers and SMBs alike can be left with escalating costs and poor delivery execution that can impact customer satisfaction. Descartes ShipRush solutions help address this problem with cloud-based tools to integrate with front-end commerce systems and parcel shipping providers for seamless package rating, labelling, tracking and postage processing. With Descartes ShipRush solutions in addition to Descartes OzLink application integration solutions Descartes pixi* warehouse management solutions, omnichannel retail and SMB customers have a broad set of technologies to streamline ecommerce, warehouse and shipping processes.

Every once in a while, something really clever turns up... a while back, I came across an article on what3words. The founders of this service decided that the current methods of sharing locations and global coordinates are either too complicated (e.g., lat/long) to actually share easily, or too imprecise and subject to interpretation errors (e.g., postal addresses) to get people and products exactly where they need to be. With a big idea to make locations mnemonic- friendly and super precise, they overlaid the world with a grid of 3m x 3m squares (57 trillion of them) and assigned each square a three-word code.