Towards Seamless System Integration in Road Haulage Firms

Abstract

Organizations in competing environments have tried to use IS/IT for improving their performances by introducing enterprise systems into their organizations. In the context of road haulage firms this had lead to a plethora of mobile and stationary systems to cover different tasks. Solely, interests for integration and communication between these systems have emerged. By integrating different enterprise-wide systems and applications the synergy effects can be utilized leading to increased organizational competitiveness towards higher and greater business values.

The great variety of mobile and stationary systems developed by diverse vendors creates a mobile-stationary divide in existing systems. It can also lead to incompatibility issues in communication when integrating different systems, which must be handled. Handling this problem usually involves great costs in terms of time and spending valuable organizational resources and thus needs to be addressed. A vision of a ‘total solution’ to remedy this problem is Ubiquitous Transport Systems. UTS aims to function as an IT-infrastructure applicable to the transport industry, working as a solution for seamlessly integrated systems eliminating the existing mobile-stationary divide. To contribute to the realization of the vision of ubiquitous transport systems a project “Standardization of Data Transport” has been carried out, as a part of an action research project “Value-Creating IT for Road Haulage Firms”. The aim of the project has been to develop a basis for a communication standard interface functioning as mobile-stationary gateway usable for road haulage firms and system vendors in the transport industry facilitating system integration. Further, the organizational business values that system vendors and road haulage firms can gain by using the mobilestationary gateway is presented.