Bunning Transfer Company - Rock Springs, Wyoming

Tell us a little bit about Bunning Transfer.

“We haul casing and tubulars into the field for the gas and oil rigs. We do rig moves, which is a lot of heavy hauling. And we have a commodities business hauling molten sulfur from the processing plants and some dry bulk hauling of soda ash and some commodities that are unique to southwestern Wyoming for the mines around here.

“We have roughly 80 company trucks, and at any given time we have between 20 and 25 more Owner Operators.”

Tell us how you came to the decision to move to Axon software?
“I come from a project management, IT background in Salt Lake City. I was brought into the company to start looking at some of the processes and procedures and some of the systems that were – or were not – in place.

“I needed software that was customizable, flexible, and easy for us to get the information that we were looking for. Axon offered that ability.

“Plus Axon, being in the oil patch, understood more about that part of our business than any of the other software companies.

“You put these two pieces together, and basically it was a no-brainer for us to go with Axon.”

What has been your overall experience with Axon since making that decision?
“I have been extremely impressed with the ability of Axon’s staff to listen to our needs, address them, and then train our people, all while keeping on the schedule that I had set.

“Having launched several other pieces of software in my career, Axon has been a great experience. It’s been smooth.”

What challenges did you face bringing a totally new system into your company?
“We were running on an AS 400 mainframe system. We would print out reports and financials and all of those kinds of things on green bar paper and then use a pencil to write in the margins or make columns to keep track of things like balances and so on.

“That was just the way that we had always done it here, that people were comfortable with. There was a lot of distrust of computers. Nobody really wanted to put all of our eggs in a computer basket, so to speak.

“As we progressed, I was able to show people that they could extract information quickly and efficiently. They had the information at their fingertips, and they also had a way of interacting with everybody else in the office in real time.

“They could see how easy the program was to use, how much it saved them time, how it saved costs, and so on. Most of our employees fell right into it and, within a couple of days of using the program, were comfortable enough with it that they were thrilled to use it.

“It really was going from almost the pen-and-paper ledger era to super-high-powered computer in the space of a couple months but, because of the way the program was built, the way we were able to customize it and make it fit our people, they fell right into it, and it just basically fit us like a glove.”

Can you talk about some of the areas you’ve become more efficient in?
“First and foremost, we’ve discovered that we are able to do as much work or more with a staff of three quarters what we had before.

“We’ve seen a reduction in our staffing, just by natural attrition: people leaving, moving away, or that kind of thing. And we’ve been able to continue on with the work without replacing those employees.

“We’ve gone from 20 staff to 15. That’s 5 full-time salaries, saving us maybe $180,000 a year.

“Probably the biggest eye-opener for me was when we were able to take one of our employees out of the billing department and put her into collections. It had been years since we were able to have somebody actively pursuing collections on past-due invoices.

“She has been able to collect on this bad debt, and we’ve actually seen about $750,000 to $800,000 go directly into the coffers that would have been lost income.

“We would have written it off had we not had the ability to go out and collect that, and that came completely from Axon allowing us to move employees around and do their jobs more efficiently.”

That’s a lot of money.
“Yes. You have to take into account that a lot of that has to do with the size of the jobs that we’re doing. A rig move could be anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 by the time it’s completed, so even though it ($750,000) is a very large number, a lot of that could have been a few jobs here or there.

“Before Axon, it was almost an impossible task to go through and pull all of those old bills of lading and all of the old paperwork so we could get those jobs paid. And now we’ve had the time and the access to the information to do that.

“Obviously that in itself has paid for our moving to Axon several times over within an 18-month period.”

Are there other features that you really like about Axon software?
“The ability to actually have our supervisors and company management access information on the fly, to be able to make decisions without cumbersome data gathering is big for us.
“The thing I think that I have been most impressed with is Axon’s ability to tie in 98% of what we do so that people are working together on projects at the same time.

“The real-time aspect of Axon is phenomenal. Before, when we were working on the AS400, we would have to have somebody enter in a bill, and then they would have to close out of that bill and close out of that entire section so that then somebody could go in and open that bill and write a check or print an invoice or do whatever.

“Now, with few exceptions, we’re able to have people continuously working on the same projects at the same time.

“That has allowed us to invoice more quickly and to do payroll on a more timely basis. Our Owner Operators are ecstatic about the fact that now they get paid in a timely manner because we’re getting paid in a timely manner.

“It’s that real-time aspect of Axon that has just been really impressive to me. As soon as the job is dispatched, for all intents and purposes we can begin the paperwork on that job.”
Next month we’ll continue this interview, when Andy talks to us about Axon’s web interface, the impact on employee morale, and an amazing reduction in their accounts receivable turnaround since switching to Axon.

Switching to Axon helped one Oilfield Hauler reduce their administration costs by over $180,000.00, cut their average Outstanding Receivables from 60 days to 12, and collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad debt. It’s no wonder they told us: “It Was a No-Brainer for Us to Go with Axon”

Switching to Axon helped one Oilfield Hauler reduce their administration costs by over $180,000.00, cut their average Outstanding Receivables from 60 days to 12, and collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad debt. It’s no wonder they told us:
“It Was a No-Brainer for Us to Go with Axon”