Jennifer Wall, HaulIt Customer Experience Manager at Command Alkon, took some time with me to give me the run-down on our complete quoting, dispatching and billing solution, HaulIt. HaulIt gives you real-time control to ensure you make money every day and integrates with other Command Alkon solutions for fleet & workforce management, including in-cab telematics
Here’s the scoop on all things HaulIt:
Q: First question, who is the audience for HaulIt?
A: HaulIt was designed for the aggregate and bulk trucking industry
Q: What are some features and functions of the product?
A: The product has an estimating system, which then flows into our dispatch and also into our billing system. It's designed so that the customer can input the information and the rates and pay all on one field, and for that information to flow throughout. There is also some hauler and outside hauler management systems and employee driver pay.
Q: What are some big ways that it benefits the customer?
A: Oh gosh, there are a lot of ways. I'll start with the dispatching system – traditionally, for dispatchers, they're using a spreadsheet, or they're keeping it in their own memory of how many trucks are dispatching all of their orders in a day. It's a little chaotic, not very organized, and they're not able to manage as many trucks as they could be per day. While they're dispatching at night for the orders for the following day – if they have, let's say, 200 trucks – they’re having to call every single one of those drivers themselves, which takes hours. With the HaulIt dispatch system, the entire process becomes automated. When you assign those drivers and that equipment to those orders, you press one button. Everyone’s notified of what their assignments are for the following day. So, what took two hours now takes two minutes.
Q: Oh, wow, that’s a huge time save.
A: Yeah. It's a huge difference, and you're eliminating spreadsheets. One of the biggest problems in the aggregate trucking industry that I've seen is the lack of communication internally in a trucking company. An estimator will have one bit of information on rates, a dispatcher knows something that happened on the job or maybe something else needs to be billed, and then the biller is at the end and isn't quite sure what's going on. This makes it to where everyone in the entire company is on the same page of what's happening.
Q: Okay. Does the information just goes to a portal where everyone can see the same thing? Like one information piece for everyone?
A: Actually, it's located ...the heart of it is at what we call our job. You dispatch from a job. When you quote, it turns into that job. When you bill that job, it flows through from dispatch along with notes of what occurred on the job. So, the rates stay there from the beginning for what you're billing, which locations, what your internal costs are to purchase or make that material. Anything that happened along the day where an additional charge would come through dispatch has the ability to attach to that job
Q: Are there any issues in the industry that this product addresses?
A: The aggregate industry is a very, very small profit margin. With our job costing system, you can run our history reports. The customer can see their true net profit at the end of the day so they can learn how profitable they are. How much are they paying to their outside haulers? How much are their internal driver expenses? They can truly see and assess how they should be estimating their work. It's an extremely important tool, and I believe our most important in the system is our job costing.
Q: How do we sell HaulIt? Is it cloud-based, like a month to month subscription, or is it direct sales?
A: It is a month to month SAS-based product.
Q: What other Command Alkon products can HaulIt integrate with?
A: About 90% of our clients are integrated with TrackIt, and there is huge benefits of being integrated from TrackIt because it basically makes the product paperless. Instead of a driver having to go and manually write down, on what we call a haul sheet, the 10 loads they did that day and turn them in, and then a biller's got to organize it and will spend three days doing data entry. Now, they're utilizing the TrackIt system, and all those tickets and countages come in automatically including the statuses. Have you ever been onsite at an aggregate company and seen the amount of paper that's running around those offices? It’s incredible. You just become paperless when you purchase both, and it saves several days worth of work.
HaulIt helps you to truly understand your profitability by delivering real-time visibility to balance revenue and expenses. Your bottom line will love you!
Find out how your business can keep your profits in check with HaulIt. Schedule a 15 minute chat with us – we would love to help you determine how to take your hauling operations to the next step!
