I was driving down I-71 last week, dodging road gators.
Somebody was driving on bad tires. Or maybe lots of somebodies driving on bad tires.
I guess it’s a bad habit, counting the number of trucks pulled over on the side with truck rescue crews parked in front of them. It was a bad day on I-71 between Columbus and Cleveland.
It got me thinking about tires.
Software and Tire Purchases
We try to fix tires because they are expensive. We put a lot of money into them at the start with the expectation that we’re going to get a lot of miles out of them. Make a lot of money out of them. At some point, yes, they’re going to have to be replaced, but not soon. There are 18 of those tires on our trucks and every last one of them is expected to pull its weight.
Sometimes we get a flat tire. We pick up that piece of metal or a roofing nail and when we’re lucky, it’s an easy tire to repair. Other times, it’s a slice on the sidewall that’s a dead loss. I suck it up and just buy the replacement and hope that I don’t have that happen again too soon.
It’s those iffy repairs… you know the one’s I’m talking about. Maybe a repair will hold… maybe it won’t. Is it worth it? Should you pay for the repair? If you’re lucky, how long will it hold? Will it get you enough miles down the road to justify the expense, or should you buy another tire and forget about it?
Old software is like that. We hold on to the old software because we’re invested in it, not so much in money, but in time.
I use a program for my blog that keeps track of my search engine optimization. (If you don’t know what that means, well, sometimes, neither do I. It’s a crazy Internet and I think they change things on a daily basis.) That search engine optimization program changes all the time. There’s a reason that it changes so often is because it’s good that it’s keeping up with all the new things on the Net. But me keeping up with the program? It’s aggravating. I’ve paid for it and I’m glad to have it and it does its job well, but I have to readjust to the new version with every upgrade. The learning curve costs me time.
Old software is comfortable. I don’t have to think about it. I can type my numbers in and go.
Why should I change?
Because the world is changing. Just like that program is responding to changes on the Net so it can do the job I’ve paid for it to do, you need a program that’s going to adjust to the changes this transportation world is throwing at you. IFTA. IRP. TruckingOffice is in the cloud, not on a disk for you to have to upgrade time after time, for this very reason. We keep up to date for you.
Do you want to spend your time mending an old tire? Or do you want to put the new tire on and keep moving forward?
Let’s make it simple. We’ll give you 30 free days of TruckingOffice for you to decide. Take you last month’s worth of loads. Put them into our system. Compare how long it take us to do your billing, your driver settlement, compute your IFTA miles and schedule your next oil change. Yes, it might take you some time to learn how to use our system. But then, you’ll be rolling at top speed and that old software will just be a memory you won’t be missing any longer.
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