At McPherson Resources, near Pokeno south of the Bombay Hills, processing of materials has been improved significantly with a pretty clever piece of WZ kit from WrightZone. It’s not helping them break rock any faster, but it has eliminated paperwork for the operators, solving the problem of illegible handwriting and damaged or lost dockets in one fell swoop.
“We had to find a better way of doing it,” says managing director Mike McPherson. “With the manual process, the dockets were messy – pieces of paper floating about and the system at the mercy of the operators’ handwriting.”
The solution saw a tablet with WZLoad (loader scales software), plugged into their existing loader scales.
These days, instead of paper dockets in triplicate, the operators have tablets in their cabs. When customers come in, details are populated on screen by the operator. This information is available instantly at head office for prompt Xero-integrated invoicing and data analysis.
“It has improved load out times. We’re averaging a load time of 2 minutes, 18 seconds, this flows through to reducing vehicle onsite duration times. When trucks are running on the same job, all the operator has to do is enter the number plate and push save, as the system automatically recalls the last load details of the truck,” says Mike.
He says the new system means they now know exactly what is going out the gate in real time.
“It’s so much easier to keep track of things.
“We can now see how the day is progressing – we see what products are in demand and change what’s being produced as needed.
“The electronic data makes it easy to look back and see trends, making forecasting much easier too.”
Mike says it also means that when a customer phones querying the product volumes they’ve received, an accurate answer can be found at the click of a button, versus having to trawl though a pile of dockets.
Operator Joe Burns says he used to spend an awful lot of time flicking through piles of documents to find the right paperwork for a customer.
“Now, I just type in their name and have all the relevant data at my fingertips. It’s saving us operators a huge amount of time, and no one is climbing the loaders.
“We’ll call the docket number over the RT, print the day’s dockets for the vehicle on its last load or the dockets are emailed automatically – it’s almost too easy.”
“The system is setup in such a way that it really is simple to use,” says Joe.
“Better still, we had things we wanted the software to do, so WrightZone either configured or developed the software to suit us. For example, we wanted predictive text on existing client jobs when creating a new one, and they made it happen.
“I have no hesitation in recommending WrightZone’s support and software.”
