|
Fitting the Pieces Together: A Guide to Office Operations for the Liquid Waste, Portable Toilet & Septic Pumping Industries |
|||
|
.... |
Once you recognize that by being flexible on when a unit is delivered and/or picked up you can realize significant cost savings, the next issue is how to keep track of the deliveries and pickups so that you can
Not forget to deliver or pick up a unit
Know which deliveries and pickups can be grouped together to save time
Know that you have enough unassigned units so that you can delay pickups
Let’s look at some of the alternatives that are in common practice.
This is the most common method for owner/operator companies. Any request for a delivery or a pickup is verbally given and the unit is immediately delivered or picked up within 48 hours. Any savings by combining pickups or deliveries is obtained when two customers call at the same time. This works fine up to about 50 to 70 units. Once the number of units being managed goes beyond 70, things tend to fall through the cracks. Some symptoms are:
Units start to disappear
Billings are missed
Customers complain of late deliveries
Customers complain about dirty units (no time to clean, always on the road)
The next step is to write down the deliveries and pickups and keep them on a clip board or in your shirt pocket. This works fine until about a 100 units and then a move is usually made to a Delivery/Pickup ticket where space is available to enter site address, billing address, type of work to be completed and any billing information. The tickets on the clip board can be arranged in date and town order and as new deliveries and pickups are requested, the tickets can be placed in the correct order. Each evening you can rapidly go though the tickets for the next day’s work and order the tickets to minimize driving time. If there are not enough for the day, you can look forward in the stack and do an early delivery to fill out the schedule. This method can work for hundreds of units depending on the mix of specials and long-term unit rental. Some symptoms of inefficient operation using this method are:
Clip board is replaced by folders. This means you are spending a lot of time shuffling paper.
Customer service level is dropping, i.e., complaints , because you are using service route drivers to handle units not directly on there service routes.
Billing for second units and partial month pickups are being missed.
This exhausts the manual/paper solution and computerization is the next tool. At first go around, it is always cheaper to do-it-yourself (?). The move is made to using spread sheets, word processors and custom programming.
The computer solution combines the tickets with an electronic list so that you can sort items by date and print out a list of deliveries and pickups to be completed. This is a big help in that the time shuffling tickets is shortened. Problems with this solution are:
Additional time is required to enter data twice into a computer. Once for the organization of deliveries and pickups and again for billing.
Missed billings because delivery/pickup activity is not tied to billing.
People who answer the phone cannot get an updated schedule so they can set the customer expectation correctly.
This last stage is usually used by companies who want more control. The previous solutions worked, but as unit volume grew, they found themselves being less efficient. This solution is to have the information entered once by the person handling the phone and all grouping and ordering of deliveries and pickups are done electronically. The benefits of this approach are:
There is no duplicate data entry.
Everyone can look up the latest delivery/pickup schedule to properly set customer expectations.
All work is linked to billing so that new deliveries cannot be serviced unless billed.
Early pickups are billed before units can be removed from service routes.
Specials can be tracked so that C.O.D. is properly collected and reported.
All of the methods work, some require more of your personal time and attention then others.
Let’s look at how you can recover your costs of delivering and picking up units.