Digital transformation is taking hold in almost all industries now, revolutionizing traditional business & business software. Even industries like construction, mining, and bulk material transportation are seeing the effects of new cloud-based economies.

Simple technologies like QuickBooks Online allow you to set up a corporate accounting system in a matter of minutes with very little capital outlay.  Autonomous drones can fly a quarry or construction site and relay information back up to the cloud and provide earthwork calculations and topo data for a site immediately.  These are examples that would have taken days or even months to complete five years ago, and required significant resources.  As a result, industries such as construction, mining, and trucking, which were often lagging in productivity gains from technology, are now some of the most impacted by them.

By transitioning scale ticketing desktop applications to the cloud, Fast-Weigh makes scale house data available to all your operations, no matter where you are. Moving information from being locked up in a scale house computer and making it available on any web browser or mobile device allows your company to view sales data in real-time.  Other advantages cloud-based scale software has over traditional Windows Desktop software include:

• Lower up-front cost
• Quick and easy setup
• Complete real-time backup and data recovery
• Ability to share data with outside customers and haulers
• Access from any type of computer (Mac or Windows) and mobile device (Apple or Android)

Looking back over the years, we have seen the rise of many transformational technology companies like Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and, more recently, companies like Airbnb and Uber.  While not exactly scale ticketing software, each of these great software solutions have the key characteristics of all modern applications, which include the following:

• Agile development. By leveraging cloud computing, software developers can develop rapidly, with more frequent iterations and a faster response than traditional desktop software.
• Cloud-developed. Software developed for the cloud allows you to take advantage of a multitude of resources and back-end services not available in traditional desktop software. Cloud-developed applications eliminate the need for developers to worry about complex hardware and network infrastructure and focus on business solutions.
• Microservice and API-backed applications. The shift to granularize software allows for fast development cycles and new feature development. This type of development reduces application complexity and simplifies the introduction of new modules and features more frequently.
• Analytics platforms.  Modern cloud platforms allow for much richer understanding of information. Modern tools simplify things for both the developer and business user and transform data into information.
• Lightweight. In almost any new development projects modern cloud application are replacing complex Windows Desktop software.  By allowing you to install, learn, and begin using in a much shorter period of time, these cloud based applications provide quick and simple adoption for new software.  Lightweight does not imply fewer features, but rather higher efficiency, lower cost, and most importantly, more responsive and functional applications.

In today’s digital economy, the implications of these new transformational technologies are forcing all companies to rethink their cloud strategies.  Fast-Weigh is one of the first in our industry to adopt a cloud-based software framework and modern software development practices.  This allows our customers to leverage all the benefits of this new breed of software, most of which are not available on traditional Windows Desktop applications.

Steve Rasmussen

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