From phone calls and spreadsheets to one system for transport orders
When vehicle transport orders live in inboxes, call logs and spreadsheets, you pay for it in time, mistakes and uncertainty. Here is what it costs – and how to get rid of it.
Most businesses that move vehicles never chose the way they work. It just ended up that way. Someone calls the carrier, someone sends an email, and a spreadsheet on the shared drive is supposed to keep track of it all. It works – until it doesn't.
The hidden cost
The problem with phone and email isn't that they are old-fashioned. The problem is that the information stays with one person. When the salesperson who ordered the transport is out with a customer, nobody else knows whether the car has been collected, who is driving it, or when it will arrive.
That creates three kinds of cost that rarely show up in the accounts:
- Chasing. "Have you heard anything about that car going to Bergen?" costs two people time every time it is asked.
- Double entry. The same address, registration number and contact person get typed in several places – and end up wrong in one of them.
- No history. When a customer asks what happened with a delivery three months ago, the search starts in old email threads.
What changes with one shared place
The point of a system for transport orders is not more screens to look at. The point is that the order belongs to the business, not to the individual employee.
In Frakteren the need is entered once: what is being moved, where it is, where it is going, and when. The order becomes visible to the people who need it, one of the company's own carriers takes the job, and the status is updated along the way. Everyone sees the same picture, whichever department they sit in.
The most important question is not "which tool do we use", but "how many people do I have to ask to find out where the car is".
Start with one department
You don't have to change the whole organisation at once. Pick the department that orders the most transport, move their orders over, and let everyone else carry on as before for a few weeks. That gives you an honest comparison – and colleagues who ask to join.
Three signs it is time
- A car has been left standing because everyone thought someone else had ordered transport.
- The overview of ongoing jobs exists only in the heads of one or two people.
- Your carriers receive orders in three different formats from the same company.
If you recognise even one of these, the gain from gathering your orders in one place is bigger than you think.