By / Jessica Kirby

Contractors know the pain that shipping and delivery challenges can cause for their operations. Tight delivery windows, restrictions on sizes of loads for cranes and trucks, poor communication with drivers, and missing items on trucks all cause havoc on the job site and cause lost time, productivity, and profit each time they occur—and for many contractors, these things occur daily.

Kyle Meuggenburg, shop foreman at Piedmont Sheet Metal in Burnaby, BC, says when the shop experiences shipping delays, it affects more than just customer sentiment. 

“We may end up with backlogged products, which means fewer sales overall and lost revenue,” he says. “If products aren’t being delivered on time, customers will lose interest and brand trust. With all of the competition in sheet metal these days, it is very important for us to deliver in a timely manner.”

Piedmont has four in-house delivery drivers, which minimizes shipping and delivery issues, but this isn’t a fool-proof solution. “When we need to use couriers, that can cause delays and result in lost customers and money,” he adds.

Sometimes the challenges are logistics related or specific to a shop’s size and capabilities. Gathering and grouping large orders to be shipped can be a challenge when pieces are scattered throughout the plant, potentially compromising order accuracy.

“It’s important to have quality control in place so orders that are inaccurate or incomplete don’t slip through,” says Darrin White, shop foreman, Black & McDonald in Scarborough, Ontario, adding that material tagged with incorrect dimensions or piece numbers causes “many headaches” for the shipping team.

Shipping and delivery information must be accurate and specific to maximize productivity and to ensure customer provided directions are clear. 

“We also struggle with finding room to stage large orders,” White says. “We have a small space in which to pack and stage orders, and this is the biggest challenge we face.” 

He adds that, in fact, all aspects of shipping are important to ensuring the job’s success. “From the initial bid and acquisition of the job to the final delivery and payment, shipping plays a huge if not the biggest role in a project’s success,” he says.

This winter and early spring, BuildCentrix is releasing a series of upgrades and new features that speak directly to solving contractors’ shipping woes. The  separate Shipping Calendar  is tied in with the Production Calendar, allowing shippers to see the production status on all items included in the order. This feature will also provide the ability to assign and change the shipping dates and times, as well as update the standard and custom shipping status between Not Started, Ready, Shipping, Partially Shipped, and Delivered. 

The new Delivery Windows allow field personnel to choose and set the delivery windows to align with the time they have access to the crane or unloading area on the job site. This feature also allows the shop to set the time materials are expected to arrive on the job site. 

Currently, all orders can be assigned to either a single entity truck or loading bay with the Truck/Loading Bay feature, and this allows users to know the location of their materials and plan the most efficient and logical place to stage the order. In a new release of this feature coming early spring, the concepts will be separate so orders can be assigned to a loading bay and to a truck to accommodate larger operations.

The Loading Bays function allow shops to indicate the loading bay at which an order can be found for pick-up or loading an outgoing delivery truck. The Delivery Truck assignment function allows users to input information about the vehicle such as size and capacity to help organize which orders can fit on which vehicles and tracking information, such as make, model, and license plate. The system can now also assign drivers to trucks for specific days with space to record mobile numbers, license accreditation, and notes. 

These features mean people at every step of an order’s process can see the what, when, how, and why of every shipping and delivery in real time—addressing real world problems and bringing contractors back to the bright side of doing business.  ■