Noah Dolgoy recalls working with an excavation company and witnessing the frustration involved in managing the movement of dump trucks.
“There was huge transactional friction between the company and the people who owned the vehicles,” he says. “Everything required phone calls to as many as a hundred sub-contractors, while generating spreadsheets and paper tickets — it was a time-consuming nightmare to move material on and off the sites, with one person employed full time just to phone dump trucks.”
He’s now the chief executive officer at Tread, a revolutionary web and mobile platform designed to eliminate the friction between dispatchers and operators, while making both their jobs easier.
“Tread is based on strengthening relationships between construction companies and subcontracted haulers,” says Dolgoy. “Tread allows dispatchers to batch-assign detailed jobs to the sub-contractors they already use, often in less than a minute. Once a job is accepted by a contractor via Tread, the platform can employ live GPS tracking through the hauler’s smartphone to follow their progress, anticipate arrival times and confirm delivery. Instead of a process that some dispatchers have likened to herding cats, Tread transforms all of your drivers and their vehicles into a single, manageable fleet for a day.”
Equipment operators are invited onto the Tread platform by companies they already work with. Once they acknowledge the invitation, they can onboard to the platform in about a minute, ready to accept assignments digitally through their smartphone.
“They can opt to use Tread’s ‘Log My Job’ feature to keep track of their progress to create accurate digital invoices that can be submitted immediately on job completion,” says Dolgoy. “Industry data suggests that 17 per cent of paper invoices are disputed, in large part because they’re not detailed enough. For detailed digital invoices provided by Tread, our dispute rate is zero.”
Tread also analyzes work on an ongoing basis, offering insights on better routes, smarter scheduling and more efficient vehicle deployment.
“It’s critical data that’s impossible to collect and process using traditional dispatch methods,” says Dolgoy. “For many of our customers, securing these vehicles is their largest outside spend and any increased efficiency can improve the bottom line.”
PML Contracting in Ottawa has been successfully using the Tread platform to manage the vehicles in its heavy equipment rental division.
“I’ve been in the business for 35 years and handling dispatch has required juggling a lot of information about vehicles, drivers and their specific habits,” says Paul Lalonde, president of PML. “A lot of what I did involved making personal phone calls to clients, some before 3:30 pm and others at different times. That’s information I would have to write down or keep in my head.”
Lalonde’s succession plan involves eventually passing the business on to his children. But they weren’t always eager to handle truck dispatch duties until they were introduced to Tread.
“My kids love the fact that they can use the Tread app on their smart phone,” he says. “That kind of technology is in their blood. By making it easy for anyone to assign drivers without going through me first, Tread has taken all of the headaches out of dispatch.”
Dolgoy’s elevator pitch for Tread wraps up the product’s value proposition to dispatchers and haulers in two sentences: “If you send out a job on Tread, you know the job is going to get done. If you complete a job on Tread, you know you’re going to be paid what you deserve.”
This content is sponsored by Tread in collaboration with ConstructConnect™ Media. To learn more about Tread, visit tread.io.
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