Mexico Trucker Online

They’re still kicking the notion around in the blogs and talk shows of how Mexico is the decrepit third world country, with no databases. Trucking companies with no maintenance programs and drugged out drivers that can’t find their asses with both hands.

So today, as I was surfing the net looking for ideas, I ran across an excellent article, written about CEMEX, called, Bordering on Chaos

Steve Sommers on the overnight trucking shows continues to point out the lack of the most basic of databases in Mexico.

The result is three integrated systems: one for taking orders, another for checking a customer’s financial profile, and the last for tracking software the ops room dispatchers use. And the whole thing is accessible from any of the 30 PCs spread throughout the Guadalajara headquarters - sales, accounting, maintenance - as well as through Cemex’s global WAN by any staffer armed with the right passwords.

A lot is made of the presumption that Mexican trucks, by the very fact that they are Mexican, are ill maintained pieces of junk. Equipment is a capitol investment. You don’t maintain it, it breaks and you’re out of business. Business in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, realized this.

But change is real, and if companies like Cemex are to stay in the game, they need to cultivate people other than the well-rounded private school graduates who run everything important in Mexico. Everybody knows that: In the Guadalajara ops room, both Oscar Suárez and Alejandro Contreras - thirtysomethings whose schooling stopped after high school - are getting university degrees at night on Cemex scholarships. At a ready mix plant a few miles away works Javiér Esparza, a 33-year-old who started out with Cemex changing oil. His schooling ended when he was 15. Now he’s an integrated systems manager making sure that all trucks in Cemex’s Pacific region are up-to-date in their maintenance schedule. As part of the deal, he’s back in school too.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. It won’t happen in Mexico and it won’t happen in the peoples minds who are terrified the “white establishment” is on it’s way to extinction in the U.S. But change is happening.

The new generation in Mexico is making certain of that.

Take a moment a read the article. And keep in mind. These data systems are the norm in Mexico, and the article I posted was written 10 years and 4 months ago.

It sort of sheds a whole new light on what the opponents of NAFTA, the Pilot Truck Program and anything Mexican have been trying to convince you al of now doesn’t it?