Truck scale software
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Truck Scale Software is a class of software pertaining to the collection of transactional scale weighment data. Specifically for truck scales used to weigh heavy trucks, light trucks, or other commercial vehicles. The basic concept of Truck Scale Software is to provide the end user with a means of collecting and organizing weighment information.
Developers
The Truck Scale Industry is not a highly vertical niche market as one might expect. With consumers ranging from single-site low transaction "mom and pop shops" to multi-national heavy volume corporations; the various Truck Scale Software development companies have ample opportunity to differentiate by targeting the very different needs of the specific consumer types.
The basic concept of Truck Scale Software is to provide the end user with a means of collecting and organizing weighment information. Areas that the various software development companies can target, specialize in, and promote to help differentiate between each other include:
- the specific industry (see Users below)
- the type of information
- how much information
- what can be done with the information
Vendors
Before the software industry found the Truck Scale niche (in fact before the software industry was even born) scale users would either have to come up with their own customized methods for tracking data, or require that the scale vendor provide one as part of the weighing system. This lead to scale vendors needing to be able to provide data collection and management solutions in order to compete.
Today scale vendors are still offering solutions with system, sometimes in direct competition with the software developers who are creating much more powerful collection packages and dynamic user-friendly interfaces like SMS Turbo. Many of the larger scale vendors however, have started referring to certain Truck Scale Software packages or directly reselling them (for turn-key solutions).
Many a time, truck scale software (also known as weighbridge software) is part of a much larger software. Many targeted ERPs for industries like quarry/mining/agriculture contain interface module for weighbridges.
Most truck scale manufacturers develop and sell their own software for interfacing and data collection. For example, Avery, Mettler, Rice Lake etc. have their own truck scale software. There are independent software vendors like Creative Information Systems Inc., SmartB Technologies, RONWEIGH etc. who sell weighbridge applications to a variety of verticals.
Users
Within the consumer sector of the truck scale industry are several subcategories of end user. Some of the major categories are:
- Aggregate
- Agriculture
- Highway
- Solid Waste
- Asphalt
- Oil
- LPG
- Forestry
- Cement/Concrete
The consumers range from the single-scale "mom and pop shop" to multi-national corporations with hundreds or even thousands of scale sites some of them totally unmanned running on smart cards. Each customer is unique to the point where a "canned package" is almost out of the question. The market is highly service oriented with any final solution being somewhat custom tailored to the end user's needs. It is not uncommon for a software package to have an obscure feature only because one particular customer "had to have it and was willing to pay for it".
External links