Command Alkon's Apex suite of products has helped Hallett Materials shorten the timeline between order and payment to speed up cash flow and improve customer service.
Hallett is a sand and gravel supplier located in Porter, Texas. The company has two facilities on the Trinity and the San Jacinto rivers, and a third facility in Hempstead.
Commandsays Hallett needed a ticketing solution that could help them streamline operations from the scale house back to accounts receivable and payable.
Apexmanages business processes and streamlines the check-in, loading, and ticketing of trucks while connecting sales, office and dispatch operations to improve efficiencies.
Command explains that if a ticket is not signed for in Hallett’s line of business, then that load is not getting paid for.
To ensure each ticket has a signature, Apex offers a keypad that integrates directly with their scale ticketing. When the driver signs the keypad, his signature is automatically stamped on all four tickets. This ensures there is no debate when it comes to who is responsible for paying the load, and Hallett can produce a ticket immediately upon customer request.
Wade Carroll, sales manager at Hallett, says: “We have been able to cut off about a minute and 15 second on scaling and throughput. For an operation that sees 300 trucks a day – that’s saving at least 300 minutes per day!”
Part of the implementation included an All-Terrain kiosk with the Auto ID module.
According to Command, this automation keeps drivers in the cab of their truck, making for a faster check-in time at the plant.
The Auto ID module supports attended and unattended ticketing operations, speeding up cycle times and freeing the weighmaster from routine ticketing tasks. With the All-Terrain Kiosk, all the driver has to do is swipe their card on the radio frequency identification reader or enter their truck number.
Amber Strawn, dispatch and back office specialist at Hallett, says: “It’s very simple for our drivers to get themselves checked in. They just enter their code, who they are hauling for, the customer, and where they are going. They are prompted to review the order and then sign a copy of the ticket. It’s so much faster, and we don’t have to wait for the driver to sign, give a paper back, then tear tickets.”
Hallett offers a 24-hour service to its customer base to meet the need for aggregate and other materials in Houston.
“We don’t have a large turn radius, and we would have trucks back up onto the county road, so we needed a solution to quicken our load times,” Carroll continues.
“We implemented the kiosk to streamline the check-in process, and that kiosk has allowed us to expand our operations to a 24-hour operation and helps us to space trucks out so that they are not sitting at the gate waiting for operations to start. We’ve been able to slowly spread that truck traffic out over a 24-hour period.”
With the All-Terrain Kiosk, Command reveals Hallet has seen their truck volumes increase at night because they have found that some hauling companies are optimising their trucks to go pick up their loads at night and beat the Houston traffic in the morning time.
Jake McCurry, operations manager at Hallett, says: “Our dispatch and back office specialist used to work five or six twelves a week. Now we’re able to improve their schedule and work-life balance.”
The process of exporting tickets from Apex is adaptable to Hallett’s needs. They can see their tickets in PDF and Excel format and deliver them to inquiring customers. They can also transfer their tickets into their own systems on the back-end to review and edit.
The scale house at their new facility in Hempstead is built around Apex Scale Ticketing, Scale Watcher and the All-Terrain Kiosk. They are also in the process of implementing the Scale Watcher feature of Apex at their Porter location.
Scale Watcher is expected to save time and money by replacing the need to capture a signature at the point of sale. The system captures video and images of each truck, along with ticket data to verify that a truck was present at the time of pick-up. Scale Watcher will act as an additional set of eyes on the scale and another way to reconcile a load at the Porter location, given that it is a high-volume facility and a 24-hour operation.
