Based in Victoria, Australia, B&R Plant Hire set up shop just two years ago, but the business has been growing great guns ever since, managing between 80 and 160 trucks through MyTrucking each month!
Operating in Victoria and Queensland and mainly in the construction industry, they offer transport options for plant hire, with a raft of other offerings as well. The team say there are no boundaries to what they do.
National Operations Coordinator, Cyanna, and Resources Coordinator Eliza said their previous workflow management left a lot to be desired.
“It was pretty crazy, when I started I was given a phone and laptop and had to figure the rest out myself. There was no structure,” says Cyanna.
Being a lover of notebooks, Cyanna jotted everything down, put it into a spreadsheet, sent text messages to drivers individually with their jobs, and had to put everything on a whiteboard to provide some visibility of the goings on to other people in the business.
“Keeping that whiteboard up to date was just insane!” Cyanna says.
“We had so many things going on at once and when Eliza started I had to teach her the whole system. Line by line we’d enter things into the spreadsheet, and then we’d be printing out dockets from drivers and matching and cross-referencing invoices.
“We had a table tennis table where we’d pile up all the papers and organise them into different clients and jobs, then scan and invoice the clients. It was a mess and was just asking for a stuff up to happen.”
With a fair few issues that needed to be solved, the duo knew the key to it all was finding a way of streamlining and speeding up the pace at which things happened.
“If a subcontractor needed to follow up on something or ask a question, it would take days or weeks even to go through the paperwork and spreadsheets to find it,” Eliza says.
“We also had one of our biggest clients giving us feedback that they were getting invoices too late in the week. We needed to streamline everything and just make it quicker.”
Before MyTrucking
- Manual inputs that took forever
- Little transparency for the team aside from the whiteboard
- Mismanagement and miscommunication
- Looking for information for subcontractors would take a long time
After MyTrucking
- No more paper pile-ups on the table tennis table – all in one spot!
- Inputs flow seamlessly through to invoicing
- Complete visibility for everyone in the business
- Can find the information needed within 10 minutes or less
In need of a less cumbersome process, they hit up Google, quickly found MyTrucking and struck up a conversation with MyTruckings Nikola Berryman, Victoria Sales and Account Manager.
“We decided to give it a go. I don’t know how we ever did without it,” says Cyanna.
MyTrucking has made an impact right across the business but the biggest impact has been time.
“Time has been the biggest thing for us. It’s mainly just the two of us, we wear multiple different hats. MyTrucking allows us the time to do all our other jobs too, all our accounts, allocations, everything!
“For a while, we thought we needed someone just to do dockets! MyTrucking makes everything so simple – there’s no more printing, scanning and emailing, it all goes straight on the app and it allows us to get back to our clients so much quicker.”
“The speed of time to chase up a query has been a big one, and saving time in our daily lives. I would spend 3-4 days a week checking dockets and getting things ready to hand to the CFO to get invoices out on a Friday. Now I’m spending maybe one day a week and invoices go out on a Monday afternoon, so much quicker!” says Eliza.
Switching to MyTrucking was a matter of planning and making sure their subcontractors and the rest of their team knew the change was coming.
“We had to exit out the old system and get set up with MyTrucking but by week 2 we were up and running and it ended up taking probably a little over a month before we were in it fully and we felt comfortable getting rid of the old system,” says Cyanna.
“We don’t know how we managed without it! Our subcontractors are aged 21 to 70, and they also find it super easy to use. It’s made our lives and everyone else’s lives so much easier. The customisable options, the reporting, the ability to quickly find the information we need, it’s all there and we are much more efficient,” says Eliza.
The best bit? They can use the tennis table for its proper use again.
This article was originally published in Owner Driver Magazine
