Ashvale haulage, the Haulage and waste management division of the M O’Brien group of companies has made the decision to implement Podfathers paperless ticketing system to plan and manage the movements of its 70 strong fleet of tipper lorries. Working on some of the most prestigious infrastructure projects in the UK, it is very important that we can capture all of our information in one place whilst streamlining the process from point of order through point of delivery and creation of invoices.
Ashvale initially implemented Podfather on Balfour Beatty’s M4 smart motorway project where we are managing the movement and disposal of all materials and soils. The system allowed us to receive instruction from the project delivery team and communicate these “jobs” to each vehicle easily and safely. Commercial teams on the project have been very impressed with the system that gives them instant recording of material movements without the manual element of accumulating, sorting and logging tickets.

Ashvale is now rolling out the system across the rest of its operations with Transport manager Jack Dowd heading up the project. “With PODFather we can look forward to running an efficient and paperless operation. Ashvale Haulage historically relied on a manual booking system to log customer work. Jobs were called in and written down before they were passed to the planning team to organise routes and loads for the following day. Now with PODFather, and the easy to use driver app in place, things are beginning to change. Vehicle loads and movements can be planned using the system’s drag and drop interface and once completed jobs can be issued to drivers through the PODFather app which also allows drivers to collect and log all their vehicle check information prior to leaving the depot. Once our tippers are out on the road, we can use PODFather to keep track of who and what is moving where. This real time visibility makes it so much easier when we need to move loads between vehicles or make sudden alterations to our schedules It’s a massive step forward for us, and our industry, and I see nothing but huge benefits by using PODFather to plan and manage our operation.”