February 25, 2015 Vol. 12 No. 4

It seems to me that I’ve been ignoring one of my favorite organizations lately, namely the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. That hasn’t been my intention, I promise you, but there’s good work going on there that I haven’t reported on sufficiently in recent months. I’ll reverse that trend right now and dig a little deeper into NACFE in the coming weeks. It’s a very useful outfit.

Along with the product-testing work done by PIT, Quebec’s Performance Innovation Transport, it means truck buyers are well served in a way they’ve never been before. And as I write that, I realize that the existence of these two organizations wouldn’t really have been conceivable just 15 or 20 years ago.

Back then, the folks who were in charge of the trucks themselves were likely to be most concerned with maintenance, not smart spec’ing. While the former was and remains crucial, the task of organizing a truck’s various components was pretty straightforward once upon a time. Not any more.

In 2015 spec’ing the trucks and trailers is done within a cloud of competitive and regulatory demands that simply didn’t exist back then. Getting it right is the new ‘crucial’ yet the onslaught of technology creates a second cloud and makes that goal near impossible to reach with any confidence. If you’re working on your own.

Enter NACFE and, in a similar way, PIT. Both exist to help you choose products and systems and approaches intelligently. Better yet, they invite your active participation.

IN ITS OWN WORDS, NACFE “works to drive the development and adoption of efficiency-enhancing, environmentally beneficial, and cost-effective technologies, services, and methodologies in the North American freight industry by establishing and communicating credible and performance-based benefits. The Council is an effort of fleets, manufacturers, vehicle builders, and other government and non-governmental organizations coming together to improve North American goods movement.”