It always upsets me to watch a company go out of business. I didn’t know either of the two recent high profile failures personally but from my work over the last 5 years with many NZ transport companies, I know that if you want to improve your profitability, productivity and compliance, you can do.

90% of money in transport is spent and earned on the road, that is to say that it is out of the direct visibility of you or your managers.

Bear with me whilst I use a “girl” example. If you were running a typing pool, you would have a supervisor who kept an eye on the typists to make sure that they were working steadily, had no mechanical breakdowns (do typing pools still exist in these electronic days?) and had a reasonable pile of work to go at. If there were any problems, the supervisor could spot it – whether it was a planning issue – too much or too little work, a quality issue – the work is getting rushed and too many errors made that need redoing, or a people problem – not understanding the work, not knowing how to approach a particular job or, just plain lazy.

How different is the job of a transport supervisor? To my mind, the responsibility is the same; does every truck have the right amount of work? Does any truck have to rush to get the job done? Is the driver taking good care of his truck so it will continue to run cost effectively? The biggest difference between a typing pool supervisor and a transport supervisor is that one knows what is happening every minute of every day and the other doesn’t.

I didn’t start a business in transport technology because I’m a geek. I started it because it is obvious to me that the increased visibility of your operation, allows you to make better business decisions based on what is actually going on rather than what you think might be going on, or your drivers tell you is going on.

There is a slow stirring of suspicion that the government is trying to get access to electronic records of your business and that that is BAD – what about all of those “inadvertent” speeding events, those days the drivers stretch their log book hours….  So you know they happen right? And the government doesn’t have access to these records now and won’t for the foreseeable future. But you do!!

Running bent is a short term game – whether it’s a little bent or a lot bent. It is rare to find anyone in transport who has dropped in for a couple of years to make some quick money. Most of us stumbled in, loved it and stayed. Your drivers want to make it home every night. You want them to make it home every night (who wants the paperwork, the insurance headache, the recruitment circus..?) So make like a typing pool supervisor and keep an eye on your fleet to look for inefficiencies and work to improve on them.

If you know you’re running bent, a little or a lot, I can almost guarantee your profits are suffering. You are pushing your drivers (or they are pushing themselves) too hard and that means they don’t respect you, your TSL holder status, the ongoing maintenance of your trucks and maybe even your customers. There is a lot of cashflow wrapped up in those few areas.

Like any business owner, I know that cashflow is vital and that staff are our most important resources. The work we have been doing helping transport fleets turn GPS reports into management tools has netted a number of fleets massive savings – in our customers’ fleets;

  • employee respect is up,
  • truck crashes are down (phew – they needed to be),
  • idling time is down,
  • the number of speed events is down (from over 2,000 per truck per month to less than 75).
  • And fuel consumption is down – typically by between 10 and 15%

No matter what state your fleet is in now, if you want to improve, you can. It will take a bit of time, but your profit will go up, not down. Don’t wait for your operation to be fixed for you and don’t spend time worrying about what the authorities might find if at some unspecified time in the future, they get their hands on your data.

You have access to that data now. Why don’t you use it to improve your profitability, productivity, teamwork and compliance?