Customer Success: Brown Trucking

Powerful and flexible integration with PaperWise offers complete solution to Brown Trucking

Immense Growth

"Our company has grown beyond our wildest expectations," Mike Odum, Vice President and General Manager of Brown Trucking Company, says.

Founded in the mid-1960s, Brown Trucking Company began as a single dump truck operation. The company was incorporated in 1976 as James Brown Contracting, Inc., and since the early 1980s has grown from less than 10 power units and 12 flatbed trailers to over 500 power units and 3000+ van trailers. With such a large and fast growing operation and a reputation of a 99.3% on-time delivery rate to uphold, Brown Trucking Company needed a solution to help increase productivity and enhance their processes.

Brown Trucking Company became a PaperWise customer in 1996. Before adapting the PaperWise Suite of Products into their business, they were a $1 to $2 million company. Today, Brown Trucking boasts $73 to $80 million in annual revenue. Over the course of several years, the company has experienced a considerable amount of growth, expanding from one location to 14 satellite terminals with corporate headquarters remaining in Lithonia, Georgia. As the size of Brown Trucking increases, Odum is continually pleased with the level of service PaperWise has provided throughout the years.

An Expandable Office

When Brown Trucking selected PaperWise in 1996, the company had nine locations with two more on the way. Remote scanning became a necessity. "Today, we scan documents from Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Safety, DOT, Repair and Maintenance, and contracts, which gives instant access to all authorized users," explained Odum. "When you are able to respond quickly to a customer, vendor, or DOT request while you have them on the phone, it just makes you look more professional. Rather than saying, 'let me put you on hold and go pull your file' or 'let me go find your file and I will fax it to you later,' you are done with the call and can move on to other tasks."

According to Odum, remote scanning is, "the only way we'd survive." Many customers access their shipping documents online and print or send the documents to their customers electronically, direct from the company's stored images. Document imaging allows Brown to bill customers or pay drivers and owner operators quickly and accurately without waiting for the paper to arrive.

Reduced Billing Time

Operating from several locations, Brown began to experience difficulties within their centralized billing process as information was transferred between offices. It would take several days to receive and pay bills, as well as send invoices and receive payments. With PaperWise, Brown was able to retain their centralized billing, yet minimize time wasted in transit. Their ability to accomplish same-day billing has provided Brown with better cash flow, enabling them to always make timely payments to vendors.

"We were able to move from weekly billing to daily billing with little effort, greatly improving our AR position. Previously, the billing department had three long, busy days, and then two days spent looking for things to do. On long days the department was pressured to get a lot done in a short amount of time, which contributed to mistakes being made," Odum said of past operations. "Today, daily billing has leveled out the work load over the entire week."

Superior Integration

Brown was using PaperWise when they chose TMW TruckMate to manage their business. "We chose the TMW System because of its industry-wide reputation of providing leading edge software, which interfaces with both of our satellite programs," Odum said. Even with this change, the decision was made to continue using PaperWise due to it integration capabilities. "We wanted to stay with PaperWise because we were happy with it," shared Odum.

PaperWise is currently only integrated with the TruckMate Dispatch module; however, Odum hopes to integrate with other modules in the near future. In addition, the company uses PaperWise Send To for moving Crystal Report generated freight bills from TruckMate to PaperWise where a batch printing process has been implemented. According to Odum, "Integrating PaperWise Send To with the TMW Truckmate Invoice Print module, which uses Crystal Reports to create our freight bills, took some effort. However, PaperWise support and development did a fine job, and now we are able to create a new look on our freight bills if we want. We can also print freight bills for multi-companies, like our brokerage division, if needed."

In June 2009, Brown Trucking moved from a Dell PowerEdge server to an IBM BladeCenter server, which is located at their Norcross Georgia data center. The PaperWise Suite resides on a VMware virtual server and Wyse V10L thin client is used for workstations. Their main production scanning is a BBH Truper 3600 and they have 10 Kodak i30 scanners in the satellite offices.

Not only have the employees of Brown enjoyed the convenience and efficiency of using the PaperWise Document Management System, but their customers have as well. "PaperWise WebWise is interfaced with our TM3Web module which provides customers with access to POD's," Odum said. "Web access has worked so well for them that they have become dependent on it."

A Customizable Solution

Brown Trucking Company has learned firsthand just how flexible the PaperWise Suite is as it caters to the needs of several departments. Currently, the Suite is used across the company including Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Human Resources, Repair and Maintenance, Safety, and Customer Service. Odum believes that PaperWise has been instrumental in preventing Brown from needing individual Repair and Maintenance facilities at smaller terminals, and with the accountability of their accounts payable system, Brown has built healthy relationships with local vendors. By customizing the PaperWise Suite to suit their needs, Brown has experienced the most complete solution offered by a document management system.

PaperWise has proved to be a worthwhile investment for Brown. "PaperWise is powerful and flexible enough to do anything you want to do, but easy enough to manage on your own," Mike says. "Efficiency is money, and PaperWise has made us just that… efficient."