Elevate Crane Trucks and vWork

Taking the heavy lifting out of bulky jobs

Following the Christchurch earthquakes in 2013, Paul Harrison and his partner decided that the timing was right to start their own business. Despite the devastation that the earthquake caused and the personal cost for so many, Paul could see that it was a now or never moment. 

A risk worth taking

Having been in the transport sector for years, Paul believed that the best potential business opportunity was to combine his personal experience with the booming construction sector.

And Elevate Crane Truck Services was established to move bulky, heavy items from site to site in Christchurch. Items include anything from bulky trusses and shipping containers to playhouses and spa pools.

Working mainly with mid-sized companies, Elevate now has a fleet of 6 trucks over two sites. Christchurch is the main depot with a much smaller depot in Tauranga, with each truck making up to five deliveries per day.

However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing – the original system Paul implemented to help manage their deliveries proved to be difficult.

Paul explains: “We started out using different job software. But it was too rattily – it couldn’t give us the end-to-end solution that we wanted. At a minimum our builders were asking to track the trucks to site - so that they could be prepared to meet the hiab driver and minimize their time on-site.”

Software for heavy lifting

Paul has set-up his vWork account to have 13 customized job sheets specific to different job types. And these save a stack of time as the dispatcher has fixed fields to insert the key job data into every time. This degree of customization and configurability means that the Elevate team get exactly what they need – and
mistakes are a thing of the past.

Since starting using vWork, Paul, his dispatcher and customers have also welcomed the increase in visibility over the location of the crane trucks.

This has been especially valued by customers that are transporting high value electrical equipment as they can keep close tabs on where it is at all times using a map locator.

This not only removes uncertainty for everyone involved, it reduces
the number of phone calls Paul receives from his customers asking  where their materials are. 

Paul says: “We’ve been using vWork for over 5 years now. And it’s a great tool to have in the toolbox. We’ve grown steadily over that time and to be honest, we wouldn’t want to be operating without vWork – its feature-rich and easy-to-use.”

Changing the gears for the future

Elevate has a number of business tools that it uses to manage and optimize business performance. Elevate’s vWork account is integrated with Xero for streamlined billing – the days of double entry of invoices are in the past. And with the added knowledge that drivers record proof of delivery via photo or signature directly into vWork, it removes any doubt about whether an invoice is correct or not.

The next integration on Paul’s list is with EROAD. EROAD is a telemetry package that Elevate use to manage road user charges, service reminders and driver performance. vWork’s off-the-shelf integration’s are know for being straightforward to implement and can be up and running in just two hours. When this in place, Elevate will be able to pull the highly accurate data location data from EROAD into vWork. And, as this data collection is based on GPS coordinates and doesn’t need a mobile phone to collect it, it brings another level of assurance to record keeping.

Paul comments on their vWork experience: “vWork really is a backbone solution for us. We’re growing and knowing that we have adopted software that is not only easy-to-use, but highly configurable means that we’ve chosen a software partner that can support us, whatever direction we take. The integrations with our other key business tools means that we’re a well-oiled machine.”