Wairarapa-based transport company Renalls Ltd in Masterton are a family owned company with a fleet of 22 heavy vehicles providing bulk transport services around New Zealand. Like any cost-conscious transport operator, they like to run their business – revenue by truck, by kilometre, by day, in real time.
Historically, compiling this information was a lengthy manual process, with rating clerks and office administrators processing piles of dockets. First was the reconciliation of the docket against the operations diary, ensuring the job was done and coded to the right trucks; second was the rating, and sometime later there was the revenue figure.
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Organisation: Industry: Website: www.renalls.co.nz |
By combining the MyTrucking and EROAD products, a simple solution to fleet performance was realised. MyTrucking brings a new level of automation and mobility to the despatch office and EROAD’s timesaving navigation and fleet management tools provides the data. Sam Renall, Operations Manager at Renalls Transport said, “It had been a manual process, MyTrucking had all the job and rate information, and by pulling the distance data out of EROAD, dumping it all into an Excel spreadsheet and running the formulas, you could spit out the figure. It was effective but cumbersome but now I can come in on the first of the new month and have a snapshot of the business for the previous month.”
How do the two solutions integrate to produce this snapshot? Sam told us “When the EROAD solution is open on screen, a small MyTrucking icon appears at the bottom, you click on that, and select the truck and the date, and bingo.”
“When we get our numbers, we can better plan for cash flow, and business development opportunities. It gives us as an operator full visibility of jobs against vehicles in real time.”
Sam Renall
Operations Manager, Renalls Transport
Each of the Renall’s trucks has an Ehubo and all the drivers have the EROAD app on their mobile phones. Sam told us “the EROAD solution helps us to collect data not only on distance but we can accurately monitor speed compliance and poor driving. This reduces the risks of accidents and provides the opportunity to keep our insurance premiums down. It is proven that once you address the speed culture, this will naturally reduce the accident risk and at the same time you can reduce the fuel usage and tyre wear.”
The real benefit for Renalls Transport is being able to easily calculate cents-per-truck-per-day revenue. They are constantly working on identifying costs down to the smallest fraction. Sam told us “When we get our numbers, we can better plan for cash flow, and business development opportunities. It gives us as an operator full visibility of jobs against vehicles in real time.”
There are also operational advantages, with 22 trucks it is important to know exactly where each truck is and what it is doing. “Now when I look at the EROAD screen I can quickly see what each truck is doing job-wise and the status of each job,” said Sam. He told us, that it is useful to workout drive times, if the driver is held up in traffic, Sam can ring the customer and let them know when the truck and its load will arrive. “All the information you need for work compliance is on one screen, MyTrucking provides the load details such as type and volume, plus the origin of the pickup and the destination, EROAD provides the trucks whereabouts on a map," said Sam.
MyTrucking and EROAD have created an integrated platform that has removed a paper based system. Now that Sam has reduced the amount of paper administration he was doing, he can focus on other more important projects. Sam told us “the EROAD and MyTrucking integration speeds up time on payday, as there are no excel spreadsheets to wade through, I just open the reports section on EROAD and look at one screen and there are all the details I need."