In the construction trucking industry, 90% of the load and time tracking is managed with small paper tickets. Throughout the day, the truck driver collects a stack of these paper tickets in triplicate. Copies are dispersed to the relevant parties so they can all create paper invoices for each other and collect payment sometime in the undefined future. Conflicting invoices require digging up pieces of filed away paper and hours of phone tag to rectify. Meanwhile, each manual touch point introduces an opportunity for even more inconsistency. Human errors compounded by sloppy processes with little oversight and accountability quickly become unmanageable. This poses a significant threat to a business in the construction industry where profitability is directly tied to efficiency.
It’s not dissimilar to grocery stores of yesteryear. Hand-operated analog cash registers relied on the employee to enter the appropriate charges, collect physical payment, and return the correct charge to the customer. At the end of their shift, the trusted employee accurately logged their hours while they reciprocate the trust and assume they’re going to be paid on time. Whether you’ve ever had the pleasure of sacking groceries or not, it’s not hard to imagine the opportunity for a misstep. Fast forward to the growing trend of completely automated Whole Foods stores. Stores where employees are not only freed up to do other things but where mistakes, honest or otherwise, aren’t eating away at the profit margins of a struggling business model.
We often do things because that's the way they’ve always been done. In today’s economy, there’s no room for outdated, inefficient processes. Especially when stable solutions already exist. Paper tickets are a holdover from less economical days. Yet so many materials transportation operations still use them because it's a system that hasn’t failed them. Or at least they haven’t noticed how its failed them. Maybe they haven’t taken the time to calculate the wages paid to the back office for manual data entry and the reconciliation of the errors or even fraud the process creates. Perhaps they haven’t given thought to how painfully slow the process of collecting and distributing payment is affecting their productivity and ability to forecast revenue. I suppose they have plenty of space to store an infinite number of boxes full of archived tickets they hope they’re never given a reason to open again. If only there were a better option.
To compete with this, tech companies have built apps that have more utility than paper, require fewer resources, and are more accurate than any paper system could ever hope to be. Ruckit’s TicketPro brings heavy materials transportation ticketing into the 21st century. It creates and shares digital tickets with all parties in real-time allowing immediate precision record keeping and faster invoicing. Reconciliation is no longer a burden because transactions are more accurate and digital tickets can be recalled on demand from anywhere. The door is shut on fraud and customers are given visibility into delivery times and status. Office space is reclaimed from towers of cardboard boxes and countless hours are given back to your workforce for more productive tasks. The process couldn’t be any easier to adopt and it doesn’t require any new hardware. The app can run on the smartphone already in the pocket of every driver.
Paper was a solution to a problem of the past. Today, it’s become the problem in need of solving. TicketPro provides the alternative for tomorrow. For more information, visit www.commandalkon.com/getticketpro.
