A Funeral For Just-In-Time & Other Glimpses of a Brave New Trucking World

Alain Kornhauser declared an end to the Just-In-Time Era yesterday.

The Princeton University professor held up a GPS-enabled cell phone.
“This is the new paradigm,” he said.
Kornhauser is also the founder and chairman of ALK Technologies, providers of PC*Miler and other digital trucking products. His audience on Wednesday consisted of ALK fleet customers and technology partners, including Nextel (whose network supports that particular phone) TMW Software, PeopleNet and Integrated Decision Support among others.
The event, called the ALK Technology Summit, was held in downtown Princeton across Nassau Street from the university.
Not that cell phones will replace just-in-time logistics. In his own lecturer-meets-motivational-speaker style, Kornhauser seemed to be making two related points. The first was just-in-time logistics is, in his words, “inherently deterministic.” It involves a fixed plan and does not easily adapt to abrupt change -- anything from heavy traffic to a national security event.
Nor can it readily take advantage of new developments, technologies included. The GPS-enabled, computer-capable cell phone represents the evolving model, fueled by raw computer power and increasing, relatively cheap wireless bandwidth.
Kornhauser said the new model involves not just logistics planning, but real-time fleet monitoring and adaptation to changing circumstances. The professor did not provide a name for his new paradigm, but he did pass two GPS-enabled cell phones around the room for attendees to examine, to sense the possibilities.
Of course, cell phones represent one end of the in-truck technology spectrum. Depending on a fleet’s function, it may require the kind of computing power represented by PeopleNet’s new G3 onboard computer. Either way, it seems, the real-time fleet management future is almost upon us.
Kornhauser also talked about a longstanding, trucking technologist’s dream: real-time traffic flow information everywhere on the Interstate system and many secondary roads as well, information that can enable the dynamic re-routing of trucks around jams and slow-downs. There have been both technological and business hurdles to making the dream a reality, but Kornhauser broadly implied that its time is coming.
On a related subject, the professor talked about the integration of time-of-day sensitive highway data into ALK products. The time-of-day element will increasingly enable routing and operations software to more accurately predict truck ETA’s. Algorithms will consider more than simply the miles to be traveled, but also historic, observed information on real highway speeds that can be expected at any particular time of day – rush hour as opposed to overnight, for example.
Kornhauser also warned that perfection is hard to come by in such complex realms and perhaps best proved his point when he rose at lunch time to ask who among his guests had those two sample GPS-enabled cell phones, the ones that automatically reported their whereabouts. He didn’t know where they were.