TDI Fleet Services

ABOUT TDI

TDI was founded in 1994 as a refrigeration company. In 2001, they moved into heavy duty trailers and by 2004, they added trucks—primarily focusing exclusively on heavy-duty machinery.

They were also the first company to ever fully adopt Fullbay.

WHAT DID TDI NEED?

TDI approached Fullbay with high hopes and two very specific challenges they hoped it could solve.

“If we got authorized to do work, it was written down on ledgers so you couldn’t see all authorizations in one place—whether it be a notepad, whatever, it was all over the place.”

CHALLENGE #1: SLOW INVOICING

Invoicing is probably the single most important thing a shop can do. It’s how you track the kind of work you do and how you get paid for that work. TDI knew its old system could stand to improve; over the years it evolved into a long, complicated process that took hours out of everyone’s day and ultimately delayed payments and cash flow.

What if someone made a mistake down the line? Forget it; that required someone else to retrace their steps and find out where the error occurred. They’d fix it, and then have to redo all the paperwork that followed.

Understandably, billing became something of a nightmare. In those days, if TDI got a complicated invoice out in under 10 days, they counted it as a win.

CHALLENGE #2: PAPER DEPENDENCE

Paper has its own drawbacks. Work authorizations were written in ledgers – and those fill up and are replaced quickly. Authorizations and notes wound up all over the place. Searching for records involved digging through piles of papers and notebooks, which clogs up time and effort. As we march further into the twenty-first century, customers demand everything faster – faster service, faster repairs, faster invoicing. If you can’t give the customer what they want, they will go elsewhere.

Growing a business is hard enough even when everything goes right. The kind of mistakes that come from digging for paper and the errors that paper-based operations can generate nearly made it impossible.

ENTER FULLBAY

The folks at TDI were ready to try something new, but it needed to alleviate the challenges they faced with invoicing and their dependence on paper.

PAPER BEGONE

Fullbay proved itself on day one, turning invoicing into a seamless process. Once a service order was complete, the software generated nearly instant invoicing with authorizations, service hours, parts, and notes. Fullbay also acted as a digital warehouse, keeping in one place all the information that might otherwise be floating around in various ledgers or scraps of paper.

“Even if Fullbay doesn’t directly give you a metric, Fullbay’s data will enable it.”

No more scrambling around for notes written on Post-Its. No more calling the parts manager late at night to make sure they’d ordered this or that.

All the paperwork that used to take up hours of everyone’s day was suddenly confined to Fullbay, easily accessible to anyone who needed to see it.

AT LAST, GROWTH

Besides alleviating the pains surrounding invoicing, Fullbay stepped up in a second major way: It helped TDI grow into a larger, more efficient business. Fullbay’s ability to generate summary reports on the fly meant they could take a deep dive into the way their shop ran. They could see how efficient techs were and find ways to help them be even more productive. Because the software tracked efficiency and invoicing, they could see exactly what effect each change they made had on both their efficiency and their bottom line. By seeing which experiments worked and which didn’t, they were able to streamline their operations and boost their revenue.

THE LONG-TERM IMPACT

As noted above, Fullbay takes the effort out of invoicing. Instead of waiting days or weeks to prepare an invoice – followed by the inevitable wait for payment – invoices are immediately available. Payment comes in all the faster. Shops can start their net- 30 much faster, and they’ll start saving money as soon as they get up and running by restoring all those hours shop managers were spending on invoices.

This has led to a more predictable cash flow for TDI – that’s something any business would celebrate!

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

The metrics Fullbay provides continue to benefit TDI. Before adopting Fullbay, TDI figured out shop efficiency like many other shops: They looked at gross sales and lined it up with payroll to see how they were doing. The ability to see exactly what impact each shift has on their shop is a priceless advantage. Things like clocked hours, service order hours, utilization of techs, and total sales versus goals are all available at the click of a button.

TDI is eager to see what the future will bring, and so is Fullbay. Here’s to even more growth!