Based near Stanstead Airport, London, Corr Plant specialise in (you guessed it) plant hire! They have a wide range of machinery which is maintained by their own specialist team on site. In addition to plant hire, they provide skip hire and demolition services to their customer base. In this interview, we sit down with both of the company’s Transport Managers, Danielle Hawes and Sean Corr to discuss their roles, how they helped improve efficiency across the fleet and their thoughts on transport management software.
HaulTech: Can you give us some background on your roles at Corr Plant?
Danielle: Sean and I are both Transport Managers but Sean handles more of the logistics side of things and I look after the compliance side. So I make sure we are following processes whether that is internal or external like monitoring driver hours.
Sean: Yeah, so my role involves organising what the day looks like and telling the drivers who is doing what. We have 9 vehicles and if we aren’t transporting machinery then we are moving muck, top soil and all that good stuff between sites all day, we do around 60 loads a day.
HaulTech: So how would you both collaborate to do the role?
Sean: So we used to work with ticket books and we would have to spend a lot of time working together to plan the work. It could be quite difficult when most of the work is on a piece of paper which Danielle and I would have to pass back and forth to each other. Then we’d have constantly call drivers with updates and rely on them to call us on job completion.
Danielle: Yeah it could be a nightmare, especially when it’s so easy to lose paperwork. Even when we got the tickets back after the job was done, we’d have to type it into a spreadsheet then manually raise invoices through our plant hire system. It was a long process really and it took a lot of mental focus because we’d have to be constantly juggling tasks from planning work to writing up new jobs or organising drivers. But a lot of that changed when we had a Transport System.
HaulTech: Was it a positive change?
Danielle: We’ve actually seen a massive positive change. For a start it’s made working as a team much easier, we can see what each other have done on the system instead of hunting down paper. In turn that’s helped us to plug the risk of losing job tickets and the costs that come with that, like not being able to invoice customers. Now we just put the work on the system, the drivers gets the job signed off using an app and it all passes through to invoicing so we really don’t have to do much more – it pretty much does it for us.
Sean: Yeah and I’d say with that it’s actually helping us to save money, we would burn through ticket books like they were nothing, doing over 60 loads a day. And when a ticket book costs what? £5? That’s an expensive overhead which we have now gotten rid of because of the TMS (Transport Management System).
HaulTech: Plant hire and bulk firms seem to be in major demand for transport software at the moment, what do you think the reasons are behind that?
Danielle: It’s hard to say but when you do look around and see that a company is now doing things better than you are and doing things faster than you are because of transport software, I think it encourages you to get onboard. I know a lot of companies around our area are getting onboard and it’s easy to see why when it makes life so much easier and the business so much more efficient.
HaulTech: For the people out there who haven’t really looked into transport software, what would you say?
Sean: I think I speak for both of us when I say we highly recommend looking into it and finding the right system for you, for us that was with HaulTech and they’ve helped to advance us so much, it’s perfect for our sector. I wish we would have done it sooner.
If you are interested in improving collaboration across your staff and increasing your company’s efficiency with transport software then contact us today by clicking here, calling 01782 662244 or saying hello@haultech.co.uk.
