Digital Payments Pave the Way for Drivers Who Haul Asphalt by the Truckload

There maybe only one driver, but it takes a lot of people to move an 80,000-pound truck loaded with concrete, scrap metal and other materials from a producer to a construction site — and a lot of information too —  90% of which is being transmitted on paper.

However, the growing slice of industry players who have adopted digital solutions have found that they’re gaining other  benefits as well from their investment in tech, such as improved efficiency, accuracy and even safety.

“Estimates show that you can sometimes get 10%, 15%, 20% more work done in a day — sometimes more,” TruckPay CEO Barry Honig told PYMNTS.

TruckPay offers a platform used by firms in the earth-moving, scrap metal recycling and waste hauling industries. The platform manages all aspects of their logistics, including paying drivers’ invoices, integrating with the user’s current accounting system and replacing paper tickets with eTickets.

In a discussion for the Visa B2B Series: “What CFOs and Treasurers Can Teach Payments about Going Digital,” Honig told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that the creation of an eTicket — a digital record of the loads picked up and delivered — has been a key innovation in the industry.

Boosting Efficiency, Accuracy, Safety

The eTicket helps replace many manual processes.

Each job involves several steps that require recordkeeping, Honig said. These include assigning the job to a driver, checking in at a site, weighing the truck, picking up the load, having it inspected, dropping off the load, getting it inspected again and weighing the truck again.

This is still very much a paper-based business, so there’s opportunity for growth. Honig cited figures from the Department of Transportation (DOT) saying that only 10% of DOT drops across the country are using eTickets.

eTickets help transfer all the necessary details downstream into financial or inventory systems — and, in some cases, to the DOT, Honig said.

The time saved allows drivers to deliver more so they can get paid more and enables producers to get more product out the door because they don’t have trucks having to line up and wait.

eTickets also provide a digital record of when drivers get to the site, when they pick up the load, where they travel with it, what’s in the truck, what it weighs and when they drop off the load.

“With our eTickets, it is the most amount of digital forensics you could possibly have,” Honig said.

Faster, More Accurate Payments

With that information, material producers, scrapyards and others can quickly pay the hauling company or driver by just clicking a button on the invoice in TruckPay. They can send payments to a debit card, credit card or via automated clearing house (ACH). The company has looked at cryptocurrency as a potential solution for cross-border transactions.

A digital process can also reduce the time spent on reconciliation, Honig said. Currently, back offices receive thousands of paper tickets from pickups and deliveries as well as invoices that may be received weekly, biweekly or monthly. They must then reconcile that or retype it into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

It also improves safety and keeps insurance costs under control by, for example, eliminating the need for drivers to get in and out of the truck when it’s on a scale — and taking the risk of slipping and falling.

“The argument that we make to people — both the drivers and the producers — is that you’re increasing safety and you’re increasing drivers’ ability to get paid for their work — that nobody can say that they didn’t do the work — so it’s really a multilateral, mutually beneficial type of arrangement,” Honig said.

Accelerating Digitization

To encourage the industry to speed its adoption of digitization, solution providers should offer fully encompassing features that ensure users they can switch from paper to digital, show them that it’s secure, and make it easy for drivers and plant operators to use with as few clicks and as little data entry as possible, Honig said.

The federal government can play a key role as well, Honig said. There are no standards across the states and the logistics industry, but that may change in the coming years as government agencies show greater interest in digital solutions.

For example, the Federal Highway Administration earlier this month held an e-Ticketing Industry Day, a virtual event meant to promote technology solutions.

“The way we try to approach it is to say, ‘Look, let’s digitize the things that really are not terribly interesting for humans to do and let’s let them focus on things that are really much more important — operating the construction site or the plant or driving the truck,’” Honig said.

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