McCarthy Transport grows with vWork

From forest to processing and port

McCarthy Transport is a large log transport logistics company operating in the lower half of the North Island, New Zealand. As a critical part of the log supply chain, McCarthy’s offer their customers a one stop service for all their log transport needs – ranging from multi-purpose units to transport timber, chip and bark as well as wheel loaders for mill sites and railway yards.

On a day-to-day basis, the McCarthy team is called on to transport pinus radiata from forestry sites to domestic sawmills, pulp mills and to ports in Tauranga, New Plymouth, Napier and Wellington. Their customers are a combination of integrated companies who grow and harvest the trees and then undertake lumber and pulp manufacture as well as farm forest owners and wood lot marketers.

Today, the business is led by Mark McCarthy with support from two of his sons, Matt and Mike. McCarthy Transport has 129 trucks delivering over 2000 tonnes of logs daily and 229 staff based at its sites in Wanganui, Kairoi and Masterton.

McCarthy Transport is always looking at ways to do things more efficiently so that their customers receive the best service possible. And with vWork software streamlining the information sharing between port operators, drivers, customers and dispatchers, McCarthy’s are confident that they’re meeting everyone’s needs.

Real time data to drive efficiencies

After the initial gains from using vWork to plan and schedule all the jobs each day were achieved, real time alerts were rolled out across all communication break points.

The nature of the business means that the job schedule can change at short notice, usually due to an issue with logging supplies. Using vWork, dispatchers set the daily schedule so that it is ready well before the drivers start between 1am and 5am each day. And with real time push notifications between operators and dispatchers to communicate any ad hoc issues, trucks are rerouted more efficiently without the need for any voice calls.

Alerts are also used to notify external partners, such as ports officials, that the truck is within 30 minutes of arrival and what is on the truck. This means that the ports teams can front foot their online processing and have it ready for when the truck arrives.

This saves the McCarthy drivers time and provides a more seamless delivery. Using the API to pull the real time data from jobs into McCarthy’s own reporting tools, McCarthy Transport keeps a close track on progress using a performance indicator dashboard and the DIFOT (delivered in full, on time) report. And McCarthy’s customers can view their own delivery information too, as it is pulled into programs like PS Log, which forestry owners and managers use.

Mike McCarthy says: “Time is huge for us. We’ve definitely become more efficient using vWork. Dispatchers are proactive
job planners, as opposed to being extremely reactive. And it’s great to see how vWork has increased truck utilization across the fleet. We’re more than happy with the result.”

Setting McCarthy's future direction

McCarthy Transport has a clear plan for the next vWork feature they would like to enable for the business. Setting up an online portal so that McCarthy’s customers can see in real time what pickups are planned, what has been delivered and what is still in stock. This will save the dispatcher being the person in the middle of the information transfer.

Also, McCarthy’s are working on weighbridge integrations to reduce all manual data entry and increase the accuracy of the data captured. This this will save the office team a lot of time as
they will no longer need to double check data.

In the meantime, McCarthy Transport is happy with vWork and how the team use it daily. Mike comments: “When McCarthy
Transport started using vWork we had just 67 trucks, now 10 years later we have 129 trucks. vWork has scaled with us effortlessly as we’ve grown. And we’re looking forward to continuing our partnership into the future.”