Transportation and Logistics Communications Need to Move Beyond Push-to-Talk and Radios

Orion Push-to-Talk and Process Automation for Transportation & Logistics - Move beyond radios

Transportation and logistics operations urgently need to adopt new, intelligent communications solutions.  In today’s dynamic environment, frontline workers require fast, reliable, and automated communication and information retrieval methods.

Old communication methods do not offer the support needed to rapidly respond to dynamic demands.  Shipments and routings can change at a moment’s notice — for example, containers relocated in the port, urgent deliveries added to a driver’s route, or inventory reallocated following a surge in demand.

Transportation and logistics companies are large, complex, and distributed

In the trucking industry alone, there are over 500,000 U.S. companies operating over 15 million vehicles, employing an estimated 8.9 million Americans, including nearly 3.5 million drivers.  Rail, port, airport, warehouse, trucking, and delivery operations must all be tightly connected, but safety dictates that teams remain undistracted.

Despite the industry’s complexity of needs, companies have been laggard investors in digital transformation.  Transportation and logistics companies need an instant, reliable collaboration solution to meet a multitude of requirements — including the abilities to streamline operations, control costs, improve safety, and delight customers.  Investment in digital transformation to meet these needs is now possible with a platform like Orion.

Push-to-talk communication is no longer enough

In the age of enterprise technology, traditional push-to-talk radios are severely limited in their capabilities.  The antiquated land mobile radio, first deployed during World War II, used to be the primary communication tool of choice.  However, as frontline workers know, the radio no longer meets the needs of a complex logistical operation.

Radio communications require huge investments in infrastructure plus specialized knowledge to configure.  Even when properly configured, radios can’t tell dispatchers where drivers or assets are, which vehicles are in motion, or even who’s online and listening.  The outdated devices are also hampered by range limitations that can disconnect teams at critical moments.  Finally, radios only connect people, not systems — and radios are unable to automate processes or retrieve data quickly.

Fortunately, contemporary technology has produced compelling alternatives to radios.  Advances in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing have converged to enable powerful workstream collaboration for transportation and logistics operations.

When voice becomes data, operations become smarter

The Orion intelligent voice-first platform provides the most agile and secure global communication and voice automation technology available in the world today.  Workers still get that familiar push-to-talk experience and instant team communication that made radios so useful.  But by turning voice into data, Orion transforms speech into sophisticated automatic processes.

By integrating data like spoken keywords, speaker identity, location, movement, images, and sensor details into a communications stream, Orion provides unprecedented intelligence to both the enterprise and its frontline workers.  This enables digital workflows and process automation. Leveraging real-time location data, a geo-fence automates notifications for arrival and departure and automatically deploys assets for loading and unloading.  Voice commands can notify a team of new tasks to be done or pause an industrial operation in an emergency.

Voice commands also enable access to business-critical information.  Instead of using a radio to summon a person to provide an answer, or scurrying to find a desktop computer, workers can directly query the company’s systems, speeding up operations and empowering teams to work more independently.

Digital transformation has come to all industries.  Now is the moment for transportation and logistics leaders to implement new technologies, automate manual processes, and unlock data silos in their frontline operations.  The Orion intelligent voice-first platform is the foundation of digital transformation for the global transportation and logistics sector.

Learn more about Orion solutions for Transportation & Logistics.

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