Knights Heavy Towing lightens load with vWork

Hitching up to electronic job sheets

Knight’s Heavy Towing is a family business, that was set up by Angela Hill’s parents about 30 years ago. With a strong customer service ethic alongside value for money, this hardworking business has grown steadily from a one truck and driver service to employing 13 people today.

Based in Queensland, the jobs are varied - from insurance recovery work, accidents and other transporting jobs. And Angela counts herself as lucky to be part of an industry that she has grown up with and loves. Today Angela works alongside the General Manager and manages the administrative side of the business.

However, managing the admin isn’t always easy. Angela had an “a-ha” moment a few years ago, when she realized that her drivers were pretty competent on Facebook, but at times had difficulty with completing the paperwork associated with each job.

Accounting for lost time

Chasing people for incomplete paperwork is tiring – and a poor use of time. And when Angela found herself spending far too much time doing this, she decided to make a change.

Angela was introduced to vWork through another supplier – and immediately she could see how vWork could make a huge improvement to the business. Mainly by digitizing existing processes and removing paper from the equation.

Angela set up their job sheets for each job type in vWork. “It wasn’t about setting up new processes when we adopted vWork. We knew we had the right processes for our business. It was a matter of setting up vWork to match our processes exactly, which we did. Easily.”

When each job is booked into vWork, it sits in the workbench and the dispatcher schedules the next job as each job is finished. Angela finds this approach works best as it keeps everyone focused on the immediate task in hand.

The digitization of job workflows has also allowed Knight’s Heavy Towing to have 100% certainty that their drivers are completing their health and safety paperwork. The tow truck drivers now have their daily pre-start checks waiting for them each day when they log into the app.

And for sites that have risk assessments, they are built into the workflow for that job. With these checks’ compulsory, drivers must complete all the required steps before being able to move onto other parts of the job. And Angela has built-in a quality checker in the form of time-stamped
fields at the start and end of these forms – so she knows there may be a training issue if one person completes their checks and
assessments in record time.

As a result of implementing online workflows for health and safety, record keeping compliance has skyrocketed (and Angela’s time spent chasing paperwork has happily plummeted).

Angela comments: “With vWork, I am 100% confident that my team are completing their safety checks. My compliance stats are great.”

Angela also runs a skills check-in with staff via the app each month. These checks are all set up as repeating tasks – freeing up even more of Angela’s time.

Knight’s towing success

Investing in new software doesn’t happen very often for Knight’s. So, when they made the decision to introduce vWork it was important that the roll out went smoothly.

Angela comments: “The amazing support from the vWork onboarding team made the transition even better than I’d hoped. Naturally there were moments where we needed support to fine tune our set-up and the patience and support from the team at vWork made the experience straightforward and stress-free.”

Next step for Angela is getting the vWork portal up and running so her larger customers can self-book jobs. Angela’s team will then allocate them to the driver from the work bench. Small steps are having a big impact for this heavy towing business as Angela continues on her mission to remove paper-based tasks from their business processes.