Q&A With Raul Tamez from Alamo Cement Company Inc. - Copy

Raul: I think it had a lot to do with the fact that Teletrac had their own technicians. When we visited with some of the other providers, we would have to find our own technicians. In addition, we were told that the system was compatible with us...Teletrac eventually developed an  intra-state “Texas style” HOS module that would do exactly what we needed. 

 

 

Raul: The drivers love it. Initially driver behavior was apprehensive…I’ll tell you a story. I used to teach at a really tough junior high school in Texas. We were talking about how teachers react to kids and when the misbehave in the classroom. Now keep in mind this was back in 1966, more or less. If you want to have control of the kids or you want to make sure that they’re not distracting other kids in the classroom, you have to realize why they’re doing it. They’re either doing it because they want to be clowns or they want to draw attention to themselves. In one incident, I was teaching history and I stopped the class. The kid’s name was Roger, I think. I said, “Hey Roger, being that you are so interested in keeping everyone from learning in this classroom, I think it’s time for you to come up here to my desk and teach the classroom for the next 15 minutes.” So I expected laughter from the other kids. But I got nothing but silence.  Roger came up to the front of the class and did the best he could. After that I thought I was going to lose Roger but he actually turned out to be one of the better students and from then on, he was probably the informal leader in the whole group. And so ever since then, I’ve done that in business. 

 

 

Raul: Well, for example, we have a driver who is one of our highest producers. Initially he said he didn’t want to use the software because he was apprehensive. I told him to give it a shot and if it didn’t work for him, I would fully understand. But then I told him that if you like it, everyone else is going to like it because you are the person that people look up to in the organization. His revenue in the first month increased because of two things: for the pre-trip and post-trip inspections, in the old system you had to do it in quarterly increments. For example, you had to take a minimum of 15 minutes and then log it on paper to ensure that you had inspected your truck both in the morning and after the shift. 

 

Teletrac does the inspections in increments of 5 minutes, so you can save 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is. It works out to a lot of minutes at the end of the year. If you give them that much more time, they can use that time on the highway to deliver products and generate more revenue. 

We have three types of trucks: flat beds, pneumatics tankers and end-dumps. We have been able to be more successful with fewer drivers than we ever have been because it has made us more efficient. The guys absolutely love Teletrac.  

 

 

Raul: The fact of the matter is that drivers police themselves …yes we monitor whether they take the proper routes, but I have found that most drivers want to do what’s right if given the opportunity. Because one bad driver can mess it up for the other hundred and seventy nine.  

You know, truckers always get faulted for accidents but that’s not always the case. Teletrac is a great defense mechanism to protect our drivers. Sometimes traffic incidents can be one-sided. But with Teletrac, that’s not the case.