Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/560501
Customer Orders Back in the day at Brink's, we used to have a truck stop at our customers along a pre-planned route to see if they had anything to move for the day. e driver would get an order from the customer and the freight at the same time. As the freight would move through the system we would have to make sure that the paperwork would make it back to the CSRs (Customer Service Reps) so that they could create an order in our system to make sure the customer would get billed for it. Imagine how inecient this was. When I owned a trucking company, we used the telephone. Customers would call our oce or we would call them to capture the loads on a large white blotter pad with black marker, also, very inecient. is practice was gradually replaced by the fax machine and eventually by email. In larger relationships, this went the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), then Web Services route. Once it got to the fax machine or email client, it would still be printed, so you saved on the truck stopping to see if there was a load, but you were still stuck with paper. Now smartphones and email enable us to communicate with our customers wherever we are. Load Boards When the boards started, you used to have to call them to get to let them know what loads/ trucks were near you, then they would fax you a list. Obviously, you needed someone in the oce to handle this or if you were an owner operator, you stopped in a truck stop and paid a lot of money to get this information. en the boards moved to soware, but you had to install it on your PC. is was an improvement, but now nally the major boards have all moved to a Web-based system that you can run from your smartphone so there is really no more need for paper or an oce. Check Deposits Until very recently you needed someone to physically get the mail, open it, nd checks and go the bank to deposit them. I used to think nothing of this process until I realized that we were spending 30 to 45 minutes a day running to the bank. And you had to be at the oce daily to see if a check came in. is problem was resolved in multiple ways. e most expensive one for a trucker is factoring. For a signicant fee, the factoring companies will receive your checks, deposit them, and transfer the money in your account (in advance) so you don't have to go to the bank every day, which is impossible if you do any kind of long distance trucking. Now most banks will give you the option of using your phone to scan a check or if your volume warrants it you can have a check scanner in your oce. ese last two still tie you to your mailbox so we moved to the nal and most cost eective solution, the bank lockbox. Our bank receives and deposits the checks for us, so while we are on vacation, the cash keeps coming in. And no more paper unless you decide to print the deposit reports. Check Printing is was also a major force to keep you in the oce. If you're a trucker, you might be able get away with doing one print run a week, but as a broker we have to send checks to our carriers every day. e simplest solution here is to use your bank's online bill payment. In my experience, this works at a small scale but can get unmanageable quickly. ACH comes to the rescue as you can now send a le to your bank telling them who to pay for how much without having to print anything. And you can do this from anywhere. As ACH is not always possible with vendors that we use only once, we also engaged a third-party vendor that can print checks for us. I programmed our proprietary TMS, Stratebo, to upload the payments in just four clicks. I can do this from anywhere. ese last two solutions are more technically complicated and I would recommend using a TMS made for it to handle it. But again no check printing equals freedom from the oce. Dedicated Mileage Programs is is an easy one. When I started brokering I was struck by how expensive the mileage soware was. It made no sense then and still makes no sense to me today. I understand that a lot of shippers will force carriers to use one of these tools to calculate mileage for a bid and so in turn the soware providers think they have you by the throat. Google Maps need I say anything more… Free (if you insist) and on your phone, so you are not tied to a PC like you used to be. Although I assume you probably have the opportunity to you use the packaged products on a phone now. QuickBooks is was a tough one. A great number of companies in our industry use QuickBooks (QB) for their back oce accounting. QB is good but has some aws that can be overcome if you know what you are doing. QB does not play well over a network, which forces you to be close to the computer that runs it for it to operate properly. Yes, there is QB online, and if you have a very small company that may be sucient, but QB online is limited and does not lend itself well to integration with other soware like your TMS. So the solution we adopted is remote desktop (your IT dept/guy/nephew/niece should know how to do this). We even put it in the Cloud so we can run it from anywhere. "WHEN I JOINED THE WORLD OF TRANSPORTATION 19 YEARS AGO WORKING FOR BRINK'S IN NEW YORK CITY, IT WAS A WORLD OF FAX MACHINES AND PAPER, LOTS AND LOTS OF PAPER." "" continued on page 25 Vo l . 9 , N o . 5 TRUCKSTOP.COM 19