When our SCALAR orchestration platform was first introduced to the road transportation world back in 2022, fleet orchestration wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet. Cut to today, and with SCALAR in full momentum, more and more customers are telling us that it may well revolutionize the cargo logistics ecosystem.
As for us––team SCALAR––we know it will. But we didn’t learn this overnight.
So we’d like to let you in on our story.
It begins with a handful of peers with deep roots in fleet management technology from one of Europe’s top providers of fleet digitalization solutions, and their mission to redefine the way fleets are run for the benefit of the industry––and the world.
It’s 2020 and a group of five colleagues––an enterprise architect, a connectivity expert, a supply-chain guru, a marketer with a deep passion for tech, and an aerospace champion––start travelling the world with one question in mind:
What should the future of fleet management systems look like?
They have a good reason. With decades of combined fleet experience, our five OG’s can see that the industry is balancing on the verge of transformation, urgently in need of innovation to navigate the road ahead. They aren’t looking to make quick fixes or short-term improvements. Nor are they interested in building just another digital tool for the sake of doing something new. Instead, they’re on a mission to drive fleet operations to the next phase by designing the new generation of fleet management systems.
Preconceptions aside and clean slate at hand, the team interacted with customers and global industry experts in order to reframe the problems that need solving––today as well as tomorrow.
The future of transportation is electrified, connected, autonomous, and shared––that’s clear as day. And, even though no one can confidently say whether it’s 10, 20, or 30 years away, the fact is we’re already on that bridge and crossing. Mixed fleets of electric trucks, driverless vans, and human-driven or semi-autonomous trucks are now a reality, and this trend will keep on rising. And we haven’t even touched upon subcontracted fleets or freelancers and freight exchange platforms yet.
While fleets are becoming increasingly complex to manage, the world expects even more goods delivered on demand, as affordably as possible, as soon as possible. But, mixed fleets or not, there are only so many vehicles dispatchers can manage––and they can’t possibly stay on top of every single change at once and in real-time. Yet customers need to know what their cargo is up to at all times.
Without access to live actionable data, the struggle to optimize and scale could quickly turn into an existential problem for fleets.
The road freight industry has a reputation for being somewhat old-fashioned or at least slow to embrace digitalization when compared to other industries. But the actual people ushering our fleets to the new era is a new generation of tech-savvy fleet managers and dispatchers who have cut their teeth on cloud-based technologies, real-time collaboration, and intelligent solutions.
What these insights pointed to is a massive paradigm shift, followed by a swift realization: in order to empower fleets and their ecosystem to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively in this new era, we need to completely overhaul the way we think of fleet management today.
The next generation of fleet management systems must enable fleet operators to tackle the most complex of situations at the push of a button or even entirely automatically. And not just for a dozen vehicles at a time, but for hundreds or thousands––whether a driver is present or not––without missing a beat.
The next generation of fleet management is an intelligent platform which integrates all aspects of fleet operations and orchestrates the entire process from end to end.
The answer was there. The future of fleet management systems is Orchestration.
And thus began the pivotal phase of development. Drawing on an incredible pool of new and existing talent and pulling out all the stops in order to cement a spirit of engineering excellence and relentless innovation, we started building SCALAR, our orchestration platform, from the ground up.
Inspired by autonomous transport systems, SCALAR integrates AI technology and world-class live decision optimization algorithms for autonomous vehicles to create real-time dispatching and routing services. Leveraging millions of data points and machine learning capabilities, it is enriched with forecasting, se lf-learning, and live decision-making capabilities covering all aspects of operations.
The result? SCALAR can orchestrate the entire mission––that is, automatically sending the right vehicle to the right place at the right time––all in real-time.
As part of the world’s largest vehicle technology provider, we knew that achieving true orchestration would take more than just orchestrating the mission. Planning a route makes little sense if a truck is held up at safety checks or if a trailer breaks down. Our true power is rooted in ZF’s wealth of proprietary vehicle data, spanning everything from braking systems to transmission to trailer diagnostics. Our team not only has access to it, but we also have a unique understanding of how to utilize it in order to provide fleet managers with unprecedented foresight.
We call it our “secret sauce”.
