Scioto Ready Mix permeated the ready mix space in 2006 as a family-owned and operated company in Columbus, Ohio. They service over six counties in central Ohio and place a huge emphasis on their ability to deliver great service and quality products to their customers. They operate with 7 plants in 5 different plant locations.
Scioto is still relatively young in the ready mix world, but they have experienced some substantial growth in their 15 years of service. When it comes to the competition in their market, they didn’t want to just “keep up with the Joneses.” They knew that to set themselves apart from the competition that they had to transform their operations from production, to dispatch, to delivery. “Integration” is the catchword that rings through the foundations of their organization. When all of their systems work together to feed data across their enterprise, they get the visibility needed to make better business decisions and find areas to improve so that they can continue to grow for years to come.
Journey to Becoming the Preferred Provider
“Everyone in this industry knows that one miscommunication can cause a six-figure problem, and Command Alkon has already allowed us to capture issues and fix them before it costs us.”
- L.T. Miles, General Manager for Sales & Marketing at Scioto Ready Mix
They decided that Command Alkon is the perfect partner to trust with helping them to achieve their goal of an integrated technology stack. Their journey with Command Alkon began in 2018 when General Manager, L.T. Miles, and Operations Manager,Todd Thompson, met with the owners, Marty Savko and Marty Savko Jr. with the goal of trying to find an app and a tracking system to boost their game in the customer service department. The conversation led them to deciding to implement Integra, Command Alkon’s dispatching solution to quote, order, ticket, deliver, and bill ready mix concrete. Six months of conversations later led to the COMMANDbatch automated batching system, and then TrackIt for truck tracking and telematics.
From Batching to Dispatching
With COMMANDbatch, Scioto has improved their quality and speed of production, increasing their production capacity by 10-15% within the first three months.
“At the end of the day, where seconds turn into minutes, and minutes into hours, the COMMANDbatch site has, by far, been the quickest implemented technology that we’ve seen immediate financial turnaround with.”
- L.T. Miles, General Manager for Sales & Marketing at Scioto Ready Mix
Their COMMANDbatch system is integrated with Integra, which streamlines their dispatching processes from end to end, including order entry, dynamic scheduling, ticketing, truck tracking, resource management, and reporting.
“Many of our employees worked for companies that utilized Integra, so we knew before implementing that Integra was the gold standard. Our dispatchers absolutely love how easy the system is to use and how simple it is to organize orders and customers.”
- L.T. Miles, General Manager for Sales & Marketing at Scioto Ready Mix
Scioto’s dispatch team loves the color-coded routes on the screen that indicate which trucks are going to which jobs and where they are at in the delivery cycle. With Integra at play, their dispatch team has been able to cut down intercompany communication so that they can place more focus on customer service.
The solution has standardized their processes, which has been particularly important as Scioto grows in size and functional ability. Standardizing processes helps to save time to focus on areas of the operation that need more attention, or to allow employees a more functional schedule.
“Integra spaces out our orders correctly and knows exactly where the trucks are at any given time, so it can adjust a more accurate travel time on the fly. I used to work 70-80 hour weeks before Integra. Now I go home at 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon instead of 7:00 in the evening.”
- Jeremy Young, Dispatch Manager at Scioto Ready Mix
Tracking Loads in Real Time
Before Scioto implemented TrackIt, the volume of radio traffic from dispatch to drivers and phone calls from dispatch to customers was too much to manage for Scioto’s dispatch team. Now, they have cut the phone and radio traffic in half with integration of TrackIt and Integra.
With TrackIt, Scioto’s experienced drivers can drive to a jobsite that doesn’t have an address yet and drop a pin back to dispatch so that the other drivers can follow. This is helpful because the quicker that Scioto can get their trucks to the jobsite and then get them turned back around to grab more loads, the more profitable they are.
TrackIt has enabled Scioto to keep track of how many yards each of their drivers has hauled in the last quarter to use for their quarterly driver incentive program. They used to have to go to three different sources – including pen and paper – to do the math themselves. Now, that information is available to them at the click of a button.
TrackIt connects the dots between their dispatchers and all of their other departments. The plant managers know what trucks are going where and can easily communicate that with their drivers. TrackIt cuts down on the time that it usually takes drivers to worry about directions and allows them to focus on slump and the quality of their materials so that they can enhance service for their customer.
Transparency Changes the Game in Supplier Collaboration
Connecting Information and People
Now that all of their systems are speaking to each other, their dispatch and customer service teams have enough free time to concentrate on tomorrow instead of worrying about today. After nine months of having everything connected and integrated, they have a trail of breadcrumbs to be able to go back and track their efficiency.
Scioto has eliminated paper processes by working with some of their customers on the Command Alkon Platform. They share electronic material and delivery tickets, which eliminates manual work of keying and rekeying data, automates workflows, and captures real-time information, not only within their own operations, but for all of their daily transactions with their customers.
“So the ticketing in an on-demand world that we live in now, it's instantaneous. Our customers are allowed to get the invoices, get the tickets faster, match everything up, which, in the end, gets us paid faster. It's a win-win.”
- L.T. Miles, General Manager for Sales & Marketing at Scioto Ready Mix
Having all of that transaction data in one location delivers greater operational and financial insights. Scioto and their customers can find ways to improve workflows and efficiencies, monitor material movements, and use the information to place materials at the optimal location. Now, they have the visibility needed to uncover patterns where issues routinely occur, track factors like job costs, change orders, asset usage, material consumption, and worker productivity from projects to better forecast future work.
