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National Truck Driver Appreciation Week was Sept. 11–17 last year here in America. It is recognized as a time to honor and acknowledge the nation’s truck drivers for their dedication and hard work and for putting up with extraordinarily challenging working conditions throughout the year.

You can’t work in the trucking industry for long without realizing the interconnectedness of the trucking world — goods with communities, roads with ports, airports and railways, regulations across international and provincial borders and municipal boundaries, you name it. Another connection may not be immediately apparent: Canada’s National Trucking Week and “Jake” brakes.

The logistics industry in the United States is rapidly evolving. Thirty or 40 years ago, we worked within our own borders to manufacture and produce many of our own goods. In the 1980s and 1990s, this quickly shifted to China and India, because production costs and labor were much cheaper overseas. Even with the costs of transportation, the United States could manufacture goods much easier in China than in our own homeland.

Moving America forward. Designed to move a nation. These aren’t just slogans — they’re mission statements for two industries that are critical pieces of the U.S. economy.

By now, most of us have seen those TV commercials shown during the buildup to April 15 in which consumers realize their tax “professional” is actually a store clerk or a plumber.

As transportation and logistics businesses expand their services and customer bases in the rapidly evolving third-party logistics environment, many firms unknowingly expose themselves to legal risks by using a single, standard form of terms and conditions for all customer arrangements.

The case for going paperless is compelling, but how to get there is not evident. If you’re ready to eliminate the mounds of overwhelming paperwork in your office, you need to select a document-management solution.

Before adding one, two — or several hundred — trailers, a fleet manager needs to determine what equipment’s right for the application and to do it by knowing what’s out there, what’s right for an operation, and the most basic choice of all, whether to buy new or used.

It has become something of a cliché that what followed the economic deregulation of trucking in the early 1980s was even more regulation, albeit in different forms.

In order to grow their revenue, many carriers say they want to be as flexible as possible in adapting to the specific needs of shippers and freight brokers.