Managing and paying for trucking with paper tickets is a decades-old process whose extinction is long past due. This practice costs companies billions in hidden dollars; the human capital required to plow through mountains of tickets and manually enter data into a spreadsheet is an obvious expense. But, think about the data errors, fraud, lost tickets, invoicing disputes, and delayed payments that are costing your operation big bucks.
Not to mention, it takes several days for the back office to process these paper tickets, and should there be an issue, your front-line employees and supervisors have virtually no access to real time data that enables them to make decisions that might keep the operation afloat. So, what can you do?
Graniterock
Graniterock is a family-owned, California-based construction materials and contracting company that has been in the game for over 120 years. Graniterock serves as one of Monterey and San Francisco Bay Area’s premier suppliers of high-quality aggregate, sand, concrete, recycled aggregate, hot mix asphalt, and other building materials.
Graniterock’s Construction Division is known for executing high-quality paving, excavating, grading, cold-in-place recycling, concrete finish work and underground utility services. They also operate their own Transportation Division, including rail services, to deliver products to jobsites across the state.
Problem
Graniterock was working the 13.9-mile Llagas Creek project, a Santa Clara Valley Water District project in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). The project extends from Buena Vista Avenue to Wright Avenue, including West Little Llagas Creek in downtown Morgan Hill. The federally authorized preferred project protects the urban area of Morgan Hill from a 1% (or 100-year) flood and reduces the frequency of flooding in surrounding areas.
The construction for the project includes channel modifications and replacement of road crossings. The project required a significant amount of trucking, and Alec Ching, Efficiency Department Manager at Graniterock, needed a solution to empower frictionless trucking operations.
Alec’s major initiative in his role is to analyze processes and weed out any inefficiencies possible. According to Alec, trucking in California amounts to about $2.50 per minute per truck. The Llagas Creek project required a large volume of trucking from multiple brokers in a short period of time, and Graniterock had upwards of 180 trucks per day to manage.
Solution
“It is a tall order to manage 180 trucks per day, especially taking into account the manpower it requires to calculate and track incoming tickets,” said Alec. “This is where TicketPro swooped in and really helped us. We were able to match our tickets to vendor invoices to capture insight into our material and hauling costs each day.”
Graniterock uses TicketPro to capture and digitize information found on paper tickets to automatically update inventory and reconcile invoices.
Alec also worked with Command Alkon’s VP of Development for CONNEX, Michael Bordelon, to develop a solution that could track the trucks using a QR code, and then take photos of the code in the field with an iPad or phone to keep trucks accountable based on their start and intermediate times.
Results
With TicketPro, vendor invoices and tickets live in one place and are automatically matched up through AI technology. Since the data is in one place instead of dispersed across multiple Excel sheets, the user has more visibility into whether or not they are being overbilled or if there are exceptions that need clarification.
With all of the ticket data in the system, business insights are immediately available to provide a true picture of inbound material and transportation costs and outstanding payables.
On the project, they ran about 5,500 tickets through the TicketPro system and figured out that they had saved between a half hour to 45 minutes per ticket. When you multiply 5,500 ticket times 30 to 45 minutes times $2.50, that amounts to over a half million dollars just on one particular project.
With TicketPro they were able to figure out which trucks were getting passed, which drivers are underperforming, and were able to calculate how much money the trucks were owed immediately. This saved an immense amount of administrative time and boosted the efficiency in truck flow throughout the entire project.
“The TicketPro system is unique in the sense that it’s a bridge between an all-digital system and the old paper-based system,” said Alec. “Trucking is very complex because there are so many variables in the way tickets are calculated, so TicketPro is much needed in the industry in order to gain a true picture of material and transportation spending.”
For more information, visit www.commandalkon.com/getticketpro.
