J. C. Gillespie Goes Paperless with Podfather
Overview
J.C. Gillespie Limited has been trading since 1983. Initially specialising in heavy civil engineering, tunnelling, and deep sewer replacement, the company pivoted in 1998 to concentrate on developing a heavy haulage operation. Today, it boasts one of the country’s most up-to-date heavy haulage fleets, operated by a highly skilled team.
Based in Manchester and operating across the UK, the company runs low loader configurations from 6 to 11 axles alongside a variety of lorry-mounted crane vehicles and rigid plant transporters. Their diverse customer base includes clients from construction, demolition, piling, plant and vehicle sales, recycling, quarrying, and equipment manufacturing.
Removed 10
sheets of paper per job
Challenge
Prior to adopting a digital system, J.C. Gillespie struggled with highly inefficient, paper-heavy workflows that created significant administrative burdens and critical delays in billing.
- The company was drowning in paperwork, producing at least 10 sheets of paper per job.
- Vital information had to be written down manually multiple times throughout the life cycle of an order, leading to inefficiencies and issues with data accuracy and accessibility.
- It often took days, or even weeks, for physical job sheets to return to the office, delaying the pricing and invoicing process—assuming the paperwork wasn’t filled out incorrectly or lost in transit entirely.
Solution
To overhaul its transport management, J.C. Gillespie deployed Podfather’s comprehensive digital logistics solution. Incoming jobs are now recorded up to a daily cut-off point and then automatically allocated to drivers via the Podfather app on their mobile devices, removing all paper from the daily operation.
Health and safety compliance is tightly integrated into the workflow. At the start and end of every shift, drivers must use the app to complete comprehensive vehicle checks, including capturing pre-defined photographs, before they can access their daily job details. Once on-site, drivers use digital job sheets to record arrival times, capture date, time, and location-stamped signatures and photographs, and document any delays or damage.
Results
Since implementing Podfather, J.C. Gillespie has completely removed paper from its daily operations, resulting in immediate cost and environmental benefits. Crucially, because all on-site delivery data is shared with the back office in real-time, the company can now generate and send customer invoices within minutes of a delivery being completed, dramatically improving cash flow.
The transition to a digital system has also yielded major resource savings. The back-office team is no longer bogged down in the manual planning, reporting, and financial management of thousands of loads each year. The company estimates that without Podfather, it would have required at least one additional full-time staff member dedicated solely to invoicing, making the operational costs unsustainable. Furthermore, the mandatory digital vehicle checks have streamlined the management and reporting required for fleet management accreditations such as FORS.
Before Podfather we were literally drowning in paper. For every job there would be at least 10 sheets of paper, and we would write down the same (hopefully) information multiple times across the life cycle of an order. This presented problems not only in the efficiency of the operation but also in the accuracy of information recorded and its accessibility and onward use.
Michael Gillespie
Managing Director, J.C. Gillespie
