A driver for Summitt Trucking stops at a Flying J location, walks up to a Scan & Go kiosk, swipes his TCH fuel card and follows the prompts.
The first screen shows all the loads he has delivered but still has outstanding paperwork he needs to scan. He selects the load(s) he will scan and is taken to another screen where he selects a document type – a bill of lading, trip sheet, etc. He places the document into a sheet-fed scanner and repeats the process for remaining documents.
“It is just like going to an ATM machine,” says Dan McKinnon, network administrator for Summitt Trucking, a 400-truck carrier based in Clarksville, Ind.
Before Summitt Trucking used Scan & Go, drivers completed cover sheets and handed their paperwork over the counter to clerks at truck stops to scan. And when the images arrived at Summitt Trucking, a billing clerk still had to index them.
“You had to touch paperwork twice,” he says. “By going this route, (drivers) are doing the indexing for us.”
Today, images captured by Scan & Go are routed directly into Summitt Trucking’s billing system. A billing clerk can immediately complete the invoices and print supporting documents.
To sharpen the edge of its remote scanning solution, Summitt Trucking uses a monitoring tool called Watchdog from enterprise software provider TMW Systems. Driver managers receive e-mail alerts on drivers that have not scanned their paperwork within 24 hours of delivering a load. Since deploying these technologies, Summitt Trucking has reduced its billing lag time from 10 days to less than 1.5 days, McKinnon says.
