E-ticketing offers solutions to improve efficiency, safety

Trimble’s e-ticketing offers both tracking capabilities and measuring tools for deliveries. Photo: Trimble

Some jobs in the industry are literally on the move. So, one e-ticketing trend that emerged is the ability to track deliveries and trucks via GPS or Bluetooth.

TAC Insight’s software, for example, uses geofencing to ensure deliveries are on track.

“Paving jobs are moving down the highway,” Rasmussen says. “It’s a mile from where we originally started delivering. We have a very unique solution with Bluetooth capability that can follow a piece of equipment, and then that truck that’s arriving can sync up with that Bluetooth beacon.”

Trimble’s cloud-based e-tickets also have the ability to track where deliveries are on a map, meaning the user can enable GPS to see when a delivery took place or if there were any disruptions en route.

“We have the ability to ‘play back’ in time,” Lai says. “For example, say the data didn’t quite look right. You can go back to our portal, look at the screen where we do the visualization, and say: ‘[At] 6 o’clock in the morning, what happened?’ You can see where the trucks are moving around and where the loaders are. ‘Oh, OK, there’s some kind of congestion at one point. That’s why something didn’t happen as expected.’ So, combining it with GPS information is really how to take e-ticketing into another dimension.”

While GPS- and Bluetooth-based tracking can offer benefits to drivers and site managers, Holycross says the aggregate industry is still in the early stages of that utilization because many producers do not own the trucks that make the material deliveries.

“When you’re an asphalt or an aggregate producer, you might have 20 different trucks that are coming into your store every day that are just hired drivers, and they might work for you one day and maybe not the next day,” she says. “So, when you’re trying to get GPS information on all those trucks, it has been kind of a hardship for the producers to outfit the trucks and all those drivers with GPS units. It’s a lot for the producer to manage.”

Recordkeeping

E-ticketing also helps to reduce the time spent keeping track of records from material deliveries. When a company is audited, that historically meant an employee went to a storage facility and shuffled through paper tickets in stacks of boxes to locate the delivery information they’re searching for.

“When you’ve got an electronic system, you could search by a date range, you can search by a particular ticket number, by a project, and find that information in a matter of seconds versus sending someone into a warehouse to try to find copies of paper tickets that may or may not have been filed properly,” Holycross says.

One-stop shop

Some e-ticketing developers worked to create solutions that provide more than just delivery information.

For example, TAC Insight combined a range of e-ticketing capabilities into one cloud-based, mobile application for iOS and Android. As a result, the company’s app can track an entire order from quote to final delivery.

“We’re built from the ground up as a modern delivery software system,” says Bowman, TAC Insight’s director of sales and marketing. “And it’s completely automated in the cloud with the app and web-enabled systems.

“It starts with a quote, and it moves forward to an order,” Bowman adds. “Then, you dispatch that order [and] you get an e-ticket in the field. But our system will even create an e-ticket out of the quoting process.”

TAC Insight’s e-ticketing app is also expected to incorporate digital payment via credit card, ACH and Apple Pay.

« Prev Page 1 2 3 Next Page »