The Simplicity is Beautiful

Blue Line Distribution, an LTL carrier, operates 66 power units throughout the Southern US and Western Canada, with offices in Milton, ON and Miami, FL. In this recent interview, we spoke with Blue Line's Fatima DaRosa about their Axon experience.

Tell us about your experience with Axon trucking / transportation software.
"We started officially using it in April 2001. At that point, everything we did was manual, short of the accounting side. With the software, we've been able to take every single aspect of this business and put it all into one clean thing, which is great because now, instead of the old-fashioned way of tracing and searching for something - where you stood over a filing cabinet or storage boxes and you literally tore them apart looking for that historic piece of information - now it's all there. It's great; it's centralized; it's cleaned things up. I just absolutely adore this program.

And I like the fact that you guys are really easy to work with. Every time we need help, we just pick up the phone and call Axon and somebody there helps us, which is great! And you know what I like? Your guys are not -- I don't want to say the word pompous -- your guys are normal. Like, you can call them up and, if they can't figure something out, they'll say: "Let me work on it; I'll get back to you," and they actually come back with a solution."

How has Axon changed the way you do your IFTA fuel tax?
"It's awesome! We download our fuel bills so the only thing I have to enter manually is the bulk fuel that I purchase. We used some other program years ago, Prophecy, I think it was called. Axon's made it a lot easier to track, so now we just ensure that all our fuel and our cutoffs and everything's downloaded in the system. By using the PC*Miler that's integrated with Axon, all the miles just go in automatically."

How have you found the driver settlements and the owner operator statements?
"Before we started with Axon, I was doing payroll for about 13 owner operators and it would take me literally three days to do it manually. Now, we have almost forty, and we can have it all done, processed, and direct deposited in less than eight hours -- it's awesome.

I love the owner operator statements. I like the way the reports print; they're a lot easier to read. They capture everything you need. You can do your deductions and it tracks them and then I can pull up a report that tells me how much is deducted for plates, processing fees, telephones, or whatever is the case. They're very easy to read and settle."

How has the Axon system assisted with invoicing compared to what you used to do?
"Oh, you can't even compare it. It's like going from ancient times right into the twenty-first century. In the old days, we had to literally type in text and print individual invoices one at a time. And we had to import and export. The invoicing is a lot easier now. If you have to void something, the system actually tracks who voided it, and who last used that invoice. It's a lot easier. It's very user friendly. The simplicity of it is beautiful. It's made our life easier."

How has Axon improved the productivity in your office?
"Actually, we have not needed to add any more staff, and we've been able to grow. It frees up time to do a lot of things. You no longer have to post and do all these silly other things and it's just a lot quicker to write a check, to process payables, receivables. It's real time, so it's a lot easier.

What's made it easier is the manpower hours. We've been growing, and if we didn't have Axon, we'd have to have another three or four people to process the work. So it's saved us on salaries. It's freed up the owner's time. Julia used to be really involved in running payroll; she doesn't do that anymore. She just reads reports; she doesn't have to be that hands on doing the nitty-gritty work."

So you would say your annual return on the investment would be three or four wages, essentially?
"Yeah, and we're talking, like, three or four wages at forty, fifty thousand dollars, so I'd say well over a hundred and fifty. I mean, if we'd never changed, we'd need more people to man all this paperwork."

How has the staff felt about the introduction of Axon?
"They really enjoy Axon, everybody loves it. The first week I think we cried - seriously! We ran out payroll so smoothly. We set up and we were done. We implemented it -- we were getting trained - on the first and we had the payroll done by the sixth - all seventy-four, eighty checks -- in one day - and it was done -- it was beautiful!

To us, payroll's a big thing. Everybody likes it and not one of them has had a complaint about it. It's easy to learn, and as they go along, they find ways that they can improve on it. It's been excellent."

Compare your experience with Axon trucking software and your experience with your other systems.
"The other ones were tedious. With Axon, everything is integrated so there's integrity with the work that I'm doing. The beauty of Axon is, if there's an original source, such as T-check, all my liters or my gallons are flowing electronically from T-check to Axon. Within Axon, it goes to wherever it needs to go to get charged back with the fuel tax. So there's a lot less chance for human error.

I think the integrity of it is very important because it's processing a lot of numbers in a quarter for seventy trucks. Because if I had to do it the way we did before, on a spreadsheet or all that other stuff, it would be hours of work. It would take a whole week just to check out all this information. And in the old way, we used to stockpile it and do it every quarter -- it was hours of work. I remember when I first started, the girl that was doing this, there'd be a weekend of fear for her. She'd be here Friday, Saturday, Sunday and then -- maybe -- if she was lucky, she'd have it ready by six o'clock, the end of the business day. It was just a whole stressful event and it's not stressful anymore.

The other thing I really like is your work orders. We use the work orders for our maintenance shop. The mechanics at the back log in, key in their hours, and they take whatever items they need. And it charges them back effectively to our owner operators, and tracks a lot of our stuff for maintenance. It's helped us a lot by tracking all our maintenance and our equipment."

If one of your peers in the industry asked you about Axon, how would you describe your experience?
"I would say excellent. And I have. I do promote your trucking program to everybody that I speak with. [We've looked at lots of other software,] and every single one, what they all lack is, they're not integrated a hundred percent from beginning to end. Axon, I think, has the upper leg on that because you guys have done the whole package - everything - in one. So it's all you need to run a transportation company rolled up neatly into one little tool. And that - hands down - wins."