HCSS Trucking - Earle Asphalt Case Study

Customer Case Study

“We were spending two to three hours a day manually entering data from the paper tickets …HCSS Trucking has eliminated all of these delays’” - Brian Cooper, Engineering Department Manager, Earle Asphalt

Earle Asphalt Eliminates Paper Tickets, Gains Accountability with HCSS Trucking Situation Earle Asphalt Company is the construction arm of The Earle Companies, founded in 1968 by Walter R. Earle. The Earle Companies also includes Earle Residential and Commercial Construction. The organization includes multiple asphalt manufacturing facilities, which supplies asphalt for internal projects, as well as to outside customers and municipalities throughout the Central New Jersey Region.

Additionally, the organization includes Pure Soil Technologies, a Class B recycling facility that pioneered the treatment of petroleum contaminated soil in NJ., and the Walter R Earle Transit, LLC, an industry leading construction materials transportation company.

Earle Asphalt, which has won dozens of regional and national awards for its projects, serves a

range of markets, including municipal, highway, heavy construction, private and commercial.

Earle Asphalt runs some 75 trucks daily, with about 70% of the trucks brokered. Depending on projects and the number of loads per day, trucks can generate more than 5,000 tickets per month. Handling these paper tickets, and manually entering the data into a spreadsheet was a time-consuming and often frustrating task.

“Deciphering handwriting, dealing with tickets lost in a truck, or dropped off late, while working with 25 to 30 brokers, the paper tickets could be quite a headache,” says Brian Cooper, Engineering Department Manager at Earle Asphalt. “We needed a better way.”

Solution HCSS Case Study: Earle Asphalt

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The company found that better way by deploying HCSS Trucking, the mobile and web platform designed to eliminate paper truck tickets and tedious reconciliation.

HCSS Products Deployed by Earle Asphalt:

In fact, Cooper, a member of the HCSS President’s Advisory Board, was so intent on finding a better way to deal with tickets that he contributed to the design of HCSS Trucking.

- HCSS HeavyBid - HCSS HeavyJob - HCSS Safety - HCSS Plans - HCSS Equipment360 - HCSS Fueler - HCSS Trucking

Earle Asphalt, which has been using HCSS products since deploying HeavyBid in the 1990s, invited the HCSS Trucking development team out to spend time documenting workflows, tracking trucks between millers and dumpsites and between asphalt plant and pavers, as well as Earle’s backend processes.

Product Overview

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Basic elements of HCSS Trucking include: •

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iBeacons. HCSS provides free iBeacons, Bluetooth-enabled identification devices, which Earle provides to its internal and external trucks to help quickly and easily record them on job sites. The iBeacons have a three-year battery life, and can be placed anywhere within the cab of the truck for deploy-and-forget ease of use.

LoadBots. HCSS developed its patented Loadbot devices for deployment in the field and on equipment. Earle Asphalt has LoadBots mounted in various locations at jobsites, plants, and on equipment.

Ticket Writer App. The Ticket Writer App is the mobile app, deployed on an iPad, that Earle Asphalt uses to generate paperless tickets. A foreman logs in, clicks on the job they are working on, and uses the app to clock in trucks as they arrive for the day, and clock them out at the end of the day. In between, the app captures their trips for loads and dumps, including material being

HCSS Case Study: Earle Asphalt

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hauled, quantities, and cost codes. Earle can also use the app to enter photos of each truck and to enter ticket notes.

Backend Integration. Ticket Writer automatically transmits electronic tickets to Earle Asphalt’s accounting system— including HCSS HeavyJob—to provide realtime costing data, and to remove days from the billing cycle.

Reports. HCSS Trucking provides robust reporting, including the Cycle Visualizer, which allows Earle supervisors to see a timeline graph of what each truck has done during a day.

“In addition to giving the Ticket Writer app to our trucking foremen, we outfitted our dispatch in the scale house,” Cooper says. “Our milling foremen, our paving foremen, dirt foremen, we outfitted all of our people in the field with the Ticket Writer. This way there's a full circle.

There's always at least two or three people that could be clocking trucks in or clocking trucks out.”

All of this gives Earle Asphalt a level of precision and accountability for truck ticketing that

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Earle Asphalt - Serving Municipalities for decades.

simply wasn’t achievable with its old paper tickets.

“In addition to saving us enormous time and inconvenience, HCSS Trucking helps us avoid the paper ticket errors, double entries, and the potential for fraud that we had to deal with before,” Cooper says. “And we also like the realtime visibility into our trucking costs.”

Benefits Earle Asphalt has found a number of benefits since deploying HCSS Trucking, including saving 40 to 60 hours a month by eliminating ticket data entry, saving money through tighter

HCSS Case Study: Earle Asphalt

control and accountability, gaining better visibility with Cycle Visualizer, enjoying integration with HCSS HeavyJob, ease of use, and finding HCSS to be a great company to work with.

Saving 40 to 60 hours a Month by Eliminating Ticket Data Entry The team at Earle Asphalt saw immediate benefits from the deployment of HCSS Trucking, as it removed what had been a time-consuming task of gathering thousands of trucking tickets a month and manually entering the information into an Excel spreadsheet.

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field to our accounting system, slashing time from our payment process, which in turn reduces our billing cycle.”

Saving Money through Tighter Control & Accountability HCSS Trucking gives Earle Asphalt tighter control and accountability across its truck ticketing process, including in broker dealings.

In the past, a driver or broker might dispute the time on a ticket days or weeks after the fact. And there was the potential for fraud by

Earle Asphalt takes pride in its ward-winning work.

“We were spending two to three hours a day manually entering data from the paper tickets into a spreadsheet,” Cooper says. “It could be frustrating deciphering handwriting and tracking down missing tickets.”

Additional time was lost when tickets arrived late, or someone on the team was away.

“Some tickets were delivered late, if the runner was out for the day, tickets got backed up getting to the person completing the paperwork,” Cooper says. “When the person that's completing the paperwork can't do it, the data doesn’t get to project management, and then project management doesn't know what their job cost is.”

Cooper continues: “The goal of HCSS Trucking is to eliminate all of these delays. The information is transmitted electronically from the app in the

HCSS Case Study: Earle Asphalt

“HCSS Trucking has eliminated the risk of a driver changing their hours or falsely challenging a ticket.”

Brian Cooper Engineering Department Manager Earle Asphalt

a contract driver padding their hours or changing a six to an 8 to boost their hours on the ticket.

Now the broker has 48 hours to dispute a ticket.

“HCSS Trucking has eliminated the risk of a driver changing their hours or falsely challenging a ticket,” Cooper says. “We have the cell phones for either the broker or the driver in the system, so they get text message alerts when that truck has been signed in and when that truck has been signed out. It’s hard to argue with electronic documentation like

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that. HCSS Trucking has given us a level of accountability we just never had.”

Better Visibility with Cycle Visualizer Earle Asphalt is extracting high-value information from the reporting features of HCSS Trucking, including its Cycle Visualizer, which provides a timeline graph of each truck’s operation during the day. Cycle Visualizer provides Earle Asphalt with a granular view including how much time was spent at each location and the number of cycles made.

“Cycle Visualizer lights up with so much information,” Cooper says. “We can see exactly how long each trip is taking. When we are paying drivers by the hour, and one driver is making 8 round trips, and another is making only 5, you have real hard evidence of who isn’t pulling their weight.”

Cooper says HCSS Trucking also gives foremen in the field a better view into truck arrivals to help them keep pace with the needs of millers and pavers.

Integrates with HeavyJob Earle Asphalt, a longtime user of HCSS software, likes the way in which HCSS Trucking integrates with HCSS HeavyJob. In fact, Cooper, working with HCSS developers, helped specify the seamless integration between Trucking and HeavyJob. “HCSS Trucking has definitely saved us time and money, and part of this is because all of the data goes into the one HCSS platform,” Cooper says. “I don't have to use multiple programs to do the job. On the front end, HCSS Trucking is on iPads for the foremen, and on the backend,

HCSS Case Study: Earle Asphalt

it feeds into HeavyJob, which is where we’ve always wanted to have our trucking costs for real-time reporting and analysis. Integration with HeavyJob is allowing us to go up to the next level.”

Ease of Use “Took Just 5 Minutes to Train our Foremen in the Field” Each of Earle Asphalt’s internal drivers is a foreman, coordinating the efforts of brokered drivers. As part of its rollout, the company chose a miller foreman and paver foreman to use HCSS Trucking.

“We just sat down with them and showed

“HCSS Trucking has definitely saved us time and money, and part of this is because all of the data goes into the one HCSS platform.”

Brian Cooper Engineering Department Manager Earle Asphalt

them: This is how you launch the program … this is how you set up the job, select the trucks, and clock them in,” Cooper recalls. “It took just a few minutes, then they went out to the field and they started clocking trucks in, clocking trucks out.”

The test went so smoothly that they soon chose a Friday afternoon to convert the other drivers and the next Monday the company went completely paperless. The company requires all

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trucks—internal and contract—to carry the iBeacon devices.

Cooper credits the ease of use of HCSS Trucking with the smooth adoption. “In five minutes a driver was up and running,” Cooper says. “The HCSS development team made HCSS Trucking simple to use. The application is very powerful, yet it is stupid easy to use.”

HCSS: “A Great Company to work with” Earle Asphalt has long appreciated the integrity and power of the HCSS platform, and it was especially impressed with the dedication of the HCSS Trucking development team as Earle Asphalt provided its guidance on what they needed in such an application.

About HCSS Founded in 1986, HCSS is a leader in construction software and mobile applications solutions for the heavy civil, transportation, and utility industries. More than 80,000 professionals—including 48 of the ENR Top 50 Heavy Civil Contractors—use HCSS software to improve their proficiency at estimating, job management, resource management, safety and equipment management. In addition to high-quality software, for which it offers a 12month money-back guarantee, HCSS is known for providing world-class customer service with professional implementation planning, ongoing training, and 24/7 instant support, 365 days a year. For more information about HCSS, visit: www.hcss.com.

“The HCSS Trucking development team came out to visit us several times during the development process,” Cooper says. “They were extremely inquisitive. They wanted to see exactly what we needed and why we needed it.

They went out with our millers and went out with our pavers. They went out on day projects and we took them out on night projects. They worked day and night, and this effort is what makes Trucking such a great product.”

The development team credits Cooper and his colleagues at Earle Asphalt with providing great real-world insights into how the application should work. Cooper is impressed to see how many of their ideas and suggestions became part of the final product, noting: ” The development team really listened.”

HCSS Case Study: Earle Asphalt

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