What if you had the answer to your problems in the palm of your hand?
Brad works for a locally owned tree services company that also recycles green waste into mulch products. His job is to manage operations and improve sales. Brad has been testing SR Measure to see if he can improve operational outcomes by measuring piles using the app.
Brad did a lot of back-to-back measurements with the app, with and without cones, and consistently found measurements were within 1% of each other.
One thing that Brad likes about the app is that he can measure a lot. Most of the tree service green waste and mulch inventory turns quickly, so it helps to be able to understand piles in real-time.
Examples of how Brad tested the app to improve operations:
Reduce Friction with Customers
Customers periodically dispute deliveries, claiming shorted product. Brad used SR Measure to provide proof of delivery with an on-the-spot measurement, which saved the cost of giving the customer extra product to satisfy the complaint. Depending on how much product a customer disputes, this type of issue easily costs $150 – $500 per order when transportation and man hours are added to the product cost.
Limit Product Overages
Drivers routinely overload trucks for delivery to ensure customers are happy, but mainly because they don’t have an easy way to confirm what is on the truck. The loader operator has to rely on bucket counts which can vary by scoop. Losses from giving away too much product are estimated to be about 5% but could be as high as 15%. The cumulative financial exposure is thousands of dollars.
Measuring stockpiles at the time of delivery is a great way to quantify how much each truck is being filled. However, you can perform tests at your site by loading a truck with an expected volume, that truck empties the load, and the pile is measured to confirm whether the driver has a habit of overloading. This test removes subjectivity and confirms actual quantity.
Sales of Excess Product
Finally, often excess material accumulates during a month, and Brad says it would be great to understand the on-hand quantity so that customer orders could be fulfilled without shorting internal requirements. SR Measure could be used to validate the on-hand quantity of every pile, any time to meet demand requirements.
Brad would love for all of his delivery drivers to have the app, so a single-user Professional license to the app isn’t the most cost-effective solution. Brad is exploring the best way to scale with an Enterprise subscription to Stockpile Reports in which he can have unlimited users and measurements, plus the ability to measure bunkers and export or share measurements from the portal.
If you want to learn more about SR Measure for Enterprise, please contact us.