Each and every day, our customers transport thousands of returnable containers across the country. Often costing in excess of $300 a piece, these expensive assets cost far more than the contents stored safely inside them. Unfortunately, this sometimes makes them a prime target for employee theft.
Failing to adequately monitor and control your assets means there's really no way of knowing when – or where – containers have gone astray. TrackAbout’s trusted asset management software provides all the insight our customers need to eliminate these types of losses.
In the current economic environment, when margins are stretched and every cent counts, not properly controlling your inventories can really impact profitability. That’s why we’re seeing the savvier businesses turning their attention to better utilization of those assets – to ensure they don’t go missing in the first place.
Over the years, TrackAbout has seen plenty of cases where even the most conscientious and successful businesses have fallen foul of their employees selling assets off the record. Sadly, if there's money to be made, people tend to figure out loopholes and gaps in the system that allow them to take advantage.
Without an asset management system in place, assets like cylinders would most likely be loaded onto a truck at the start of the day and the required paperwork checked off, only for the monitoring to stop there.
From that moment on, those valuable cargoes could go completely unchecked until the end of the day. Drivers will make their stops, offload containers and pick up empties without anyone having a clear idea of what’s onboard. For an unscrupulous employee, it would be quite easy for a few of those assets to be "lost in transit."
But with TrackAbout helping you keep an eye on the various stages of each and every transaction, there’s little chance they would be able to get away with it.
Our estimates show that, based on a typical customer with 25,000 cylinders, TrackAbout could help cut losses due to theft by about $7,500 each year.
Our tracking application and Truck Reconciliation and Manifest Module provide full traceability.
Drivers are usually required to create a manifest at the start of each route – a detailed list of all assets that boarded a vehicle when it leaves the depot. Maybe in the past this would have been done using a pen and paper, which can be easily tampered with, but now TrackAbout digitizes the entire process.
Our Truck Reconciliation and Manifest module automatically generates the required documentation, therefore avoiding manual errors and creating a comprehensive timestamp of each delivery. It’s difficult to intentionally bypass the system as administrative access can be closely controlled so the figures and data can’t be tampered with.
With TrackAbout, a unique barcode is placed on each asset and scanned when they’re loaded onto the vehicle at the start of the day. They are then scanned as they are delivered or returned. At the end of the day, every item on that truck is scanned again. Using these data points, the delivery day is reconciled.
By closely monitoring these balances, our customers are able to see whether an asset has gone missing. Measures can then be taken to determine how this happened.
No business wants to think about its employees taking advantage, but it sometimes happens. TrackAbout software can play an important role in your company’s employee theft prevention program.
Ready to take the next step? Request a free TrackAbout demo.