Truck Scale Software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Truck Scale Software is a class of software pertaining to the collection of transactional scale weighment data. Specifically for 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.
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[edit] Industries Which Commonly Use Truck Scale Software
There are several categories of industry which relate to Truck Scale Software, including software development companies, scale systems vendors, and consumers.
[edit] Software Development Companies
The Truck Scale Industry is not a highly vertical nitch 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.
As stated above, the basic concept of Truck Scale Software is to provide the end user with a means of collecting and organizing weighment information. The specific industry (see Consumers below), the type of information, how much information, and what can be done with the information are all areas that the various software development companies can target, specialize in, and promote to help differentiate between each other.
[edit] Scale Systems Vendors
In general, the actual scale itself along with most of the physical equipment involved in a weighing system are provided by scale systems vendors. Most of the software development companies only provide their software and services as "attachments" to an existing scale system and are not involved directly with sales or installation of scale equipment. However, there are many scale vendors who provide proprietary or custom data collection solutions to their customers. Before the software industry found the Truck Scale nitch (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. Many of the larger scale vendors however, have started referring to certain Truck Scale Software packages or directly reselling them (for turn-key solutions).
[edit] Consumers - Users of the Truck Scales
Within the consumer sector of the truck scale industry are several subcategories of end user. Aggregate, Agriculture, Highway, Solid Waste, Asphalt, Forestry and Cement/Concrete are some of the major categories. The consumers range from the single-scale "mom and pop shop" to multi-national corporations with hundreds or even thousands of scale sites. 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".
