Slack Lumber Settles Delivery Disputes With Job Site Photos

Eric Marticotte's Tuesday started the way plenty of days start at a lumberyard, with a customer on the phone and a complaint about a delivery. This one said Slack Lumber and Building Supply had shipped his 2-by-4s too short. 

Marticotte, the yard's general manager, pulled up the photos the driver took at the drop. Every other board in the load was the same length, and the ones the customer was talking about were plainly shorter. 

Some days it goes the other way. A customer swears something never showed up, and there it is in the picture, right where the driver left it. "There's no dispute at that point," Marticotte said. 

Slack Lumber tested Spruce Mobile Delivery, powered by JumpTrack, in our beta program and now runs all of its manifesting through it. "I got to tell you," Marticotte said, "it's getting more comfortable by the day."

For about 70 years, Slack Lumber belonged to one owner who kept it small, with five employees and $1 million to $2 million a year in sales. His trucks went out once a week, on Thursdays, and that schedule held until he sold the business about four years ago.

Since then, the new owners have taken sales to about $15 million a year. Trucks run every day now. One partner brought his window business with him, so Slack Lumber also supplies and installs windows and doors. Marticotte joined after 23 years at another lumber dealer.

About 60% of Slack Lumber's customers are contractors. Retail customers make up roughly 30%, and builders the rest.

In the busy season, five trucks make 20 to 25 runs a day, and Slack Lumber counts every trip off the property, pickups included. That works out to 100 to 150 runs a week. The three window crews drive their own trucks and stay out of that count. 

The team was using a whiteboard. They had the staff writing the week's deliveries on the board. Then wiping off each one at the end of the day. If an employee needed to know where a load was, they had to call the yard foreman. 

The yard moved to a shared spreadsheet after that and put GPS trackers in the trucks. The tracker lagged. Sometimes it showed a truck at a job site while the truck sat in the yard. It also took proof-of-delivery photos, three per stop, and those were hit or miss. An iPhone might upload when an Android wouldn't, or the reverse, and moving a driver to a different truck in the system could stop the photos cold. 

"That was one of my biggest beefs," Marticotte said.

Every driver on the team has told Marticotte the new app is much easier to use. It runs on their phones over the company's cell service, and Marticotte said they aren't losing connections. When the signal does drop, the app reconnects. It also works offline, though nobody at the yard has needed that yet.

Drivers can now take up to nine, and Marticotte wants them to take as many as possible. He has them shoot each load from every angle, so if a customer pushes back, someone in the office can count the board ends right off the photo.

The pictures look better than the old tracker's, and Marticotte can't say why, since the drivers carry the same phones they always have. "When we do have to send it to the customer, there's not going to be any question," he said.

He also gave the sales counter its own logins. Whoever answers the phone can see whether a delivery is still in transit or finished and pull up the photos from the drop.

When we asked what he'd tell another dealer about the system, he talked about dispatch. He dabbled in it at his last company, where the software was cumbersome for the dispatch team. 

"Here," he said, "it's just easy. It's literally click and drag, click and drag. You make a mistake, drag it back." 

During the beta, Marticotte built every manifest himself to check the process. Now the yard manager and the dispatcher handle all of it. "I'm pretty sure most people that have a little handle on a mouse can actually make it work," he said. 

Vendor pickups make up a lot of the runs, and for those Marticotte can build a manual manifest with product numbers and piece counts. "I can actually tell the drivers what they're picking up," he said. The system remembers the vendors they use most, addresses included. 

Billing got easier, though Marticotte credits Spruce ERP for that part. He checks completed deliveries in Spruce Mobile Delivery, then confirms the shipped orders in Spruce and invoices the whole batch at once. "I can invoice in lumps as opposed to individually," he said.

The old trackers are still in the trucks. Marticotte hopes to pull them once everyone's comfortable with Spruce Mobile Delivery, and he'd like the three window trucks on the system at some point. 

He expects customers to get a lot more out of the system once Slack Lumber turns on automatic notifications. The team is filling in missing contact information on customer accounts first. After that, customers will get an email when their truck leaves the yard and another, with photos, when the driver finishes the drop. 

One of Slack Lumber's top three customers runs a shop with a big yard. Drivers drop his material and leave without hunting anyone down, and he's always asking, "Where did you guys put it?" 

"We won't have to send him the photo," Marticotte said. "He'll actually get it automatically."