When we set up 25 years ago, side loaders were pretty new in the market. It was the most efficient way to deliver containers. We saw the potential and capitalised on it. You could load and unload your containers whenever you wanted to, and that was the biggest selling point.
We specialised in side loaders, whereas other transport operators had fleets of normal trucks with a couple of side loaders for when they were requested. It was something new still, and we put "side loader" in the name to make sure people understood we specialised in that. Nowadays, we're doing a lot more than side loader deliveries.
Yeah, and that was the biggest problem.
The trailers are something that are continually sent out to clients so you need to have a lot of planning of where your trailers are to make sure you have enough of them in the yard to be able to send out to clients. Every day's requirements are different. We may send out 50 trailers from one branch, and we require another 50 to come back tomorrow to send out another 50, while keeping a buffer in case they don't come back on time. So being able to keep count of what you have out, what's coming back, and what's in the yard, to make sure you have enough to hire out, is essential.
It is. When you're a lot smaller scale, you can remember what you sent out and remember what you have. But now with 160 trailers being rotated every 2-hours, it's very hard to keep track of on paper and impossible to keep in your head. There were too many moving parts that were moving quickly. We needed to allocate our resources to the best of our ability. We needed something visual to be able to work all of that out.
Solar never works. It gets installed and screwed in with wires, then you'd lose visibility and not know why and later work out that the batteries had died. A lot of them would get battered and broken. These trailers are jumping up and down all day on the road and you'd find the device had fallen off, or a wire comes loose. You'd fix it up and have to wait for the battery to charge for it to come online again. We lost a lot of visibility during the downtime.
The drivers might want to hide their mistakes. That's why visibility mixed with reporting is good because you can visually see what you have and what's not being used for a week, and can ask why? What's the issue? It's like watching a football game and knowing who's winning and who's kicking goals, but it's always good to see the stats at half time because sometimes there are surprises there. The scoreline doesn't tell the whole story.
Well, for one, we know where our trailers are. It's also helped us ask the right questions. A trailer has to come back to one of the depots. If it hasn't, you can ask what it's doing? If it's at a client's site, why hasn't it been unloaded? These are key indicators of operations and monitoring. On average, we do 1400 movements a day. It means we have to make sure our resources are in the right place at the right time, otherwise, it'd be very difficult to get the job done. Whereas if you’re planned and prepared, you can move them pretty quickly, and you can move them without stress.
Yeah, truck turnaround is always a problem. You’ll always have delays in certain depots for one reason or another - but to highlight the inefficiencies and increase turnaround time, especially considering the number of trucks that go through that depot, when we multiplied that we realised we could actually open up additional capacity just by improving the turnaround time, and we did.
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