Spiral Logistics

Challenge: Adding value for customers while reducing internal costs

"The big challenge was to make us a bit more efficient and have a bigger market presence with our drivers and our customers in the field."

Spiral Logistics is a specialized logistics organization that designs and operates fleets of dedicated company vehicles and contract drivers for their customers in the steel and construction industries. They aim to deliver a quality service with the highest safety and compliance standards.

In 2019 Spiral Logistics came under new management; they wanted to transform the business by streamlining processes and reducing costs while strengthening their market presence. Spiral Logistics want to be the pinnacle of value-added excellence in the steel-carrying industry by ensuring the vehicles they provide their customers are fully compliant and tailored to their specific needs.

As an organization that provides for customers with a remote workforce of drivers, robust safety management and efficient, quality reporting is a must. Spiral Logistics endeavors to give their customers peace of mind around driver safety and vehicle compliance. The solution? Teletrac Navman's fleet management technology and solutions, including Sentinel Electronic Fatigue Management, Intelligent Multi-Camera, GPS tracking and fleet management software.

Solution: Safe, compliant fleets and efficient administration  

Initially, Spiral Logistics used Teletrac Navman’s solutions for GPS location tracking.

When new management took over, they wanted to refresh the company with new technology solutions, providing value to customers and additional growth opportunities. Management, led by Peter Jorgensen, Managing Director at Spiral Logistics, met with Teletrac Navman’s team to find out what else they could provide the business.

Jorgensen explains that Spiral Logistics continued working with Teletrac Navman after acquiring the business because it's "specifically a good fit for the steel and logistics vertical. It's very strong in safety management. Things like fatigue, mass management, electronic forms… all of that was a good fit, and that's why we went down the track of Teletrac Navman."

According to Jorgensen, Teletrac Navman solutions like TN360, FTC Manager, Sentinel Electronic Fatigue Management, Multi-Camera and Mass Manager have helped grow his business in more ways than one.

"As far as an investment's concerned, often you get one – forward-facing or rear-facing – but with Teletrac Navman, we've been able to get the return on rear-facing by saving costs, and also forward-facing by adding value. So, the ROI is definitely there."

Internally, Spiral has embraced digital record-keeping to streamline administration processes and drastically reduce the time spent on paperwork. "There was a big use of spreadsheeting in the business for vehicle maintenance, odometer readings, fuel and tax credits, maintaining an asset register, and tracking maintenance of trucks", explains Jorgensen.

There was "a lot of manual involvement in doing paperwork and filing. Now, it's all housed in the system", he says. They've replaced three full-time administration staff by implementing the technology. The admin roles were converted into value-add, driver-facing positions, which Jorgensen says are "integral to maintaining drivers and reducing turnover".

Aside from improving internal processes and cutting costs, Spiral Logistics now provides greater value to their customers with state-of-the-art fleet management technology.

Jorgensen shared that digital solutions have been particularly beneficial for his customers in the steel-carrying industry because "the drivers themselves all attend work at the customer site where the trucks are situated. So, there's no depot." Given this, he says, "a centralized system to work remotely became very important".

Jorgensen believes having the Teletrac Navman product suite in fleets to transport steel is "absolutely essential". He says, "if the provider doesn't have cameras, then they really are at risk of something going wrong and being possibly liable for an activity or a serious safety event that they might not have been responsible for", and that "in the chain of responsibility, they are at risk if they don't have a robust safety management system. Teletrac Navman is a means to getting that".

Jorgensen argues change management is paramount to the success of these solutions for Spiral Logistics. "The number one thing to determine success is to get drivers on board. That's vital for the product to be as effective as it can be". When choosing their fleet management technology, they looked for easy-to-use devices that didn't have "too much for the driver to do". Teletrac Navman's solutions fit that criterion; he says that "for whatever they need to do, you need to have driver engagement and buy-in for it to be successful."

Spiral used a staged implementation of Teletrac Navman’s solutions to encourage acceptance of the technology. Initially, they introduced digital paperwork for simple forms like uniform or restraint orders. Jorgensen explains this helped show drivers the tangible benefits of the technology. “They know that if they put in a request, they'll get a response within 24 hours, rather than hope to get a response within a week or two when the manual paperwork has circulated.” They reinforced the message to drivers that with the technology, “management can respond more quickly to help you do your job”.

The business was able to invest the substantial time saved on administrative tasks in training drivers to use the new technology; this training, along with the staged approach, created “a cultural shift”, says Jorgensen. It established trust early on, ensuring driver buy-in when cameras were installed in the last phase of the roll-out. Transparency was also crucial, Jorgensen says, “there's a lot of challenges in the field for drivers, and if they know there's footage of their delivery place, and we intend to support them and use that footage for their benefit, then they're pretty receptive to getting cameras on the trucks.”