How Andy Transport Uses TruckRight for improved efficiency in Human Resources
Asset-based transport is filled with modern technology and physical assets. However, human capital – the valued drivers who get behind the wheel and pull a load from origin to destination - is the most crucial resource to our company and to every fleet. Managing everything about our drivers – getting them onboard, orientation, training, certifications, benefits and more - is not just a service to customers, brokers and fleet, it is a means to best serve our most valuable capital: our drivers.
Nowadays, technology is available to help manage driver human resource requirements. Technology platforms are now commonly used for many facets of human resources. A human resource software platform helps companies manage training, certifications, onboarding, benefits and numerous other things (many which are customizable to specific needs) related to the human resources of a transport company.
TruckRight is one such platform. It was developed by truck fleet owners to help manage drivers and the complexities of human resource management and is widely used for the specific needs of managing a dispersed workforce of drivers.
Andy Transport now uses TruckRight. It provides a simplified paperless workflow, encompassing all aspects from recruitment through retirement.
“We all know that innovation and technology are huge components in any business plan where the goal is to scale. We also know that a successful business requires a solid foundation with an infrastructure that supports automation. As we prepare our internal processes to scale ANDY, I believe that each incremental step we take toward a digital process will be beneficial to our long-term objectives. Our goal is to build an HR foundation that will not only support that growth but sustain it long term”, says Tammy Gauthier, Vice President, Marketing and HR at Andy Transport.
“Getting to a place where all internal processes are electronic involves overcoming some hurdles. This is why we decided to partner with TruckRight. Their solution allows us to automate a substantial portion of our driver recruitment, onboarding, training, employee life cycle and offboarding processes. It also allows us to contribute to our company’s environmental objective by going paperless”, added Gauthier.
“We couldn't be more excited about our partnership with TruckRight and are eager to discover the value this new tool will bring to our business”, concluded Gauthier.
By Truckers for Truckers
The TruckRight brand has an interesting beginning. Lisa and Dirk Kupar are a husband-and-wife team who conceived the idea of this software platform to manage the many requirements of operating a fleet and its drivers when they were on the road near Grove City, Pennsylvania, as Kupar describes it.
The couple team were owner-operators for Atlas Van Lines and had nine trucks. They later started a driver leasing agency in Canada. The idea for a software platform to manage multiple aspects of their company arose as they saw the need to manage and juggle many moving pieces at once within their company, Kupar Enterprises. Together, they set out to develop comprehensive software that could simplify the day-to-day business.
"TruckRight is pleased to welcome Andy Transport to our family," says Dirk Kupar. "There are several similarities in our stories; my wife and I also started as truck drivers and worked our way up to owning TruckRight, so there is great value in this new working relationship.”
Kupar says that by using a Human Resources platform such as TruckRight, operators are best empowered to see and interact with things such as training, compliance, benefits and other relevant human resource information. The platform provided a place, accessible via mobile app, for transparency to the driver, while affording fleet managers a way of managing the many elements of running the fleet.
"By automating their applicant tracking system (ATS) and on-boarding and integrating TruckRight with their electronic logging devices (ELD) and online training systems, Andy is adding a whole new level of automation into their hiring and on-boarding processes. The HR and recruiting teams will be able to focus even more time on creating interpersonal relationships with their drivers, which we know is one of the keys to retention in this industry", concluded Kupar.
Driver-Friendly Attention to Detail
For transportation companies, TruckRight includes words and language familiar to the transportation industry and the requirements of the trade. It also addresses the specific workflows of recruitment and adds automation to such recruiting flows.
Kelly LaPointe is the VP of Business Development for TruckRight. She says some of their clients may have as many as 15 stages to their recruiting pipeline while others have only three. This makes TruckRight ideal as it is adaptable to however many stages are required and can help manage any workflow in the recruitment process. LaPointe adds that it is important to be able to not only adapt to different stages of recruitment but to understand what happens at each stage so TruckRight can be a very useful tool. It can alleviate many burdens for HR managers in addition to recruitment and is quite user friendly allowing for a friendly interaction with drivers dispersed out in the field.
A Swiss Army Knife for HR Management of Transport Companies
TruckRight has a mobile DOT application and a personalized landing page with customizable applications and job board integrations. It provides automated email campaigns, candidate scorecards and real-time access to partial applications.
It also provides expiration alerts for certifications and required DOT documents, training requirements, directly to the employee or contractor, automated annual reviews plus an auditor portal for remote access to all compliance documentation. It is also great for tracking and managing training requirements and online courses for topics such as orientation, on-boarding documents and the ability to access e-libraries of training.
“There are many different things, from a culture perspective, that can help build positive rapport between the driver and the company even before they set foot on site," explains LaPointe. "We know that a driver is generally at risk of flipping to another company within the first 90 days of employment. This serves the driver by showing the company culture and providing good reason to stay with the company.”
"It's important to continue your on-boarding culture of people's faces through online training and video messages which are all available within the portal," she adds. "Andy Transport specifically uses an online training platform that integrates with TruckRight where the information is centralized. It's a one stop shop where they can see everything about that driver."
The Right Technology at the Right Time
When it comes to innovative approaches to the challenges of running an asset-based transport company, it goes beyond being an innovative idea. It is a tool that fleet owners and managers can use to manage their most valuable resource: their people and, more specifically, their drivers.
Such a solution is even more fitting today as transportation companies have entered the spotlight as a crucial link in the global supply chain. But an even more important link in that chain is the driver: recruiting them, retaining them, training them and making sure that all certifications, actions and other things related to compliance are respected and adhered to consistently. TruckRight is a tool to centralize the management of all HR aspects, as it does for Andy Transport, with the right technology at the right time.