Do you want to save time, money, and the environment?
I think we are all aware that we have an environmental crisis on our hands. Facing problems like deforestation, pollution, spillage from oil tanks and traffic accidents, and waste everywhere, it’s something we cannot ignore anymore. Companies need to start taking responsibility and change their procedures to be more environmentally friendly. All the companies we work with have made the decision to abandon old-fashioned paper-based procedures that are both time consuming and bad for the environment, and transition to an electronic invoicing and logistics system, and their businesses are better off for it. Read on to find out how your company can help yourselves and our planet by ditching the paperwork and installing an ePOD logistics system.
Less Paper: The first, and most obvious is that you and everyone at your company will use much less paper once you switch to electronic. You can finally abandon the tedious process of filling in a job sheet, duplicating it, transferring the information into another system, print out the final invoice and mailing that to the customer, or however your process runs. Instead, you will only enter the details of the job, and the details along the way can be entered into the same system via an app that all your drivers will have on their smartphone. If they make an update along the way that information will feed instantaneously into your back-office system, thus saving everyone from a mountain of paperwork. This will save your company time and money and limiting your use of paper will contribute to the diminishing of deforestation.
Did you know that over the last 40 years, worldwide paper consumption has increased by 400 % and that 35 % of all harvested trees are used for just that: paper. So, if scrapping paperwork will benefit your company significantly and have a positive impact on the environment, then there’s no real reason not to make the switch, right?
Vehicle checks: It is imperative that the vehicles of your fleet are properly maintained and even though a daily vehicle check is a tedious task, especially on a rainy day when the last thing you want to do is walk around the vehicle to check everything. But it’s necessary to ensure the vehicle is well maintained, and help prevent accidents and reduce vehicle running costs.
Therefore, it’s handy to have a system that has a mandatory vehicle check that has to been competed before your driver will even get to his or her list of jobs. If the vehicles are properly maintained it increases the fleet’s overall fuel economy, and also reduces the risk for accidents. Preventing accidents is not only good for your drivers’ safety, but it also spares the planet from the extra pollution and oil spillage that will occur as a result of a crash.
Optimised routes: Now that you have contributed to saving the trees and made sure your vehicles are safe and economical to drive, let’s move the focus to being on the road. If you use route planning and optimisation software then you turn a labourous manual planning task which often produces sub-optimal routes into one which takes seconds and makes the most efficient use of your available fleet resources. Powerful routing algorithms can plan thousands of runs and jobs in minutes, which saves you hours in admin work every single a day. Additionally, when the job routes are planned and optimised to be the most efficient – taking into consideration the delivery locations, customer time windows, vehicle capacities, driver hours, potential traffic, etc – it saves your workers driving time, and time is money.
However, there are other ways that route optimisation helps your company lower the amount of fumes that comes out of your vehicles. Fewer fumes equals fewer fuel and vehicle running costs, and these can be hugely significant.
More jobs: If you’re a company that runs a large fleet of vehicles, making lots of deliveries and collections every day then you’ll probably want to ensure you make the most out of your existing fleet. So the more jobs you can take on without having to take on more vehicles and drivers, using more paper and fuel, or increasing driving time and administration too much, that would be ideal wouldn’t it? The best thing would be to have a software system that streamlines all work processes, plans and optimises all runs for you, and enforces mandatory vehicle checks and delivery processes.
So how can you achieve this? You install a system like PODFather.
With Podfather you get a system that includes everything we’ve mentioned in this article, but also handy little features like live tracking so you can always stay one step ahead and know where your drivers are. PODFather is a modular system that can be customised to fit your company’s needs.
