Safeway Driveaway from Richmond Indiana

For the past 25 years Safeway Driveaway Inc. of Richmond, Indiana, has been delivering transit buses, vans, and school buses all over the United States. They currently dispatch approximately 150 truck drivers.

Safeway’s Tammy Mathews spoke to us about their Axon experience.

Tell us about your experience with Axon.
“Axon has made it easier to track drivers or a particular bus number or even a customer if we need to look up everything that we’ve done for that customer.

That’s been a major difference for us. Before, there was a lot of chasing documents and information, and now it’s down to just a couple of minutes, at most, to find anything we need.

Before Axon Trucking Software, we entered a daily Excel spreadsheet of everything that was going on, and we printed it out after the day was over, and that’s all we had to track things.

We had to physically look through a binder to track how many trips and miles our drivers had made and so on, so it has made a big difference.

And if we needed to find a specific order, you would just hope that somebody had a better memory than you did to pinpoint about what month it might be if you’re looking for something.

So it’s amazing how it’s changed for us.”

Has that helped your relationships with your clients?
“Oh, yes. Now we can tell them immediately if a bus is en route or when we delivered it. If they’re looking for something old, we can go right to it. It speeds things up considerably. It’s helped us develop better relationships with our existing customers.”

Has the system helped you manage your truck drivers?
“All we have to do is track the orders that they’ve delivered and the advances they get up front to pay for their fuel and a few expenses. Really it’s pretty simple, but it’s definitely made the process a lot smoother.

Axon has really helped with the payroll process. We were using Peachtree before, and it was probably a four- or five-hour deal each week to do payroll. It was very complicated, and now I can do it in about an hour. That’s my biggest thing - it’s just so much more out of the box than Peachtree.”

Has Axon helped improve your invoicing process?
“Yes. Prior to Axon we had issues with missed invoices, sometimes up to five a month. We really couldn’t catch them unless somebody called us about it.

It was pretty hard to catch before, but now I do a report and go back and, if any have been missed, I can clear it up quickly. Axon is probably saving us $3,000.00 a month right there.”

Has Axon helped improve the productivity in the office?
“Yes. I keep going back to those good old reports - not having to search through whole binders of information to find out how many buses we delivered for a certain customer to make sure that we were making enough money from that customer.

It would take a whole afternoon to figure that out before. Now I can do it in a matter of minutes, and I can get it to my boss quickly. That makes things go a lot smoother when I don’t have to stop what I’m doing for the rest of the day to figure out something that just takes a few seconds now.”

Tell us a little bit about the support that you’re getting from Axon.
“It’s been great. It’s nice to call and get an instant response to whatever problem I’m having. If I can’t figure it out, I can call and I can get it taken care of in a few minutes. It’s nice getting an instant fix.

One of the greatest concerns for new software users is ease of use. How have you found the move to Axon?
Oh, I think it’s a lot easier. It’s very easy to use. And the training was really great because it was step by step, and it was on our level, and we didn’t go on to something else until we understood what was going on. So that was nice.”

If you’re talking with an owner or manager from another trucking company, what would you say to them about buying and using Axon Trucking software?
“That they should just do it! I’d probably ask them what they were using now, and how much time they spend every month doing reports, and how much time they spend at the end of the year doing 1099s because those are the areas that have been such a timesaver to me. And I would probably ask those questions to show them how long it takes me to do the same things now.

It’s been an excellent experience. There’s so much less work and a lot less paper chasing. It’s just been a lot easier to know what our bottom line is.”

"Axon is saving us $36,000.00 a year we were losing in missing invoices"