Combined transport & double-weighing bridge integration, an interview with Arne Bracke

Today, we are speaking with Arne, our Product Manager! Hey Arne, what’s up? What’s a Product Manager?

I’m great, thank you. A Product Manager looks for common market needs among our customers in order to build new features. We have to prioritise creating as much value for as many customers as possible with the resources we have, such as developers and engineers. “Building the right things and building them right.” That’s my job.

Thank you for sitting down with me, Arne. Let’s discuss one of our more recent features: the double-weighing bridge integration. How does it help customers?

We have integrated with weighbridges for a long time, but the current feature only allows weighing on one platform. So, we get a number back from one platform and store it in Peripass.

What we have now is a new feature that allows double weighing. So if a customer has two platforms, the customer drives a truck and trailer on them.

And we know in one weighing how much the truck weighs and how much the trailer weighs. That is a significant innovation.

What is the most significant benefit of your improvement?

If you can only use one weighing platform, you first have to stand on the platform with your truck, manually note down the weight, then stand on it with the truck and trailer, and then you can note it down again or start reading. Before, you had some manual work and had to calculate and organise those weighings correctly. It wasn’t easy, and we couldn’t digitise it either. The input had to be plugged into the serving system manually anyway. Now, we can do it in one go.

We also store it digitally immediately. As soon as a truck comes in fully loaded, both with the trailer and the truck itself, and it drives out empty, we know exactly how much it has unloaded, both from the truck and from the trailer.

Let’s take a peek into the future. The combined transport feature is coming up; can you tell us more about that?

This means that drivers coming to the site have multiple assignments. You want to complete those assignments one by one on your site without that driver having to register multiple times. Without your dispatchers having to think of: “I can’t assign that one to a dock yet because he has to do something else first”. Then you also know that you might have to prioritise that driver because he has another assignment on the site afterwards. So, it creates much more insight into a sequence of activities that need to happen for the same truck.

So, are the benefits mainly for the administrative staff?

There are certainly advantages for drivers, too. Today, there are sites that ask you to drive in multiple times if you have multiple activities to actually have a clear trail of activity, timestamps, photos, you name it, for each operation. This update makes that unnecessary.

On the other hand, there is definitely a benefit for dispatchers and staff to have a clearer understanding of the sequence of activities. They can set better priorities and create a more efficient flow. For example, they can avoid having all combined transport actions already active and the driver getting three commands: “go to that gate, go to that gate, go to that gate”. We can now ensure that the sequence is respected and that only one activity is transparent to the driver and the dispatcher doing that next.

Are there any other things you would like to add?

Handling each operation nicely is the only correct way to run a combined seamlessly and correctly. So, you also have clear timestamps for each operation. You can note when loading started and, when loading was finished, and what photos were taken during that loading. If you want to do that properly and have all the information afterwards, thus avoiding any disputes, it is just a necessity. It is necessary to have a full trail of all operations—full administrative transparency.

That sounds so exciting for our customers! When will it be ready?

Our team is currently developing and testing it to a T, so that will be in Q3. So keep your eyes open!

Thank you for all the information, Arne!