Trucking Risk and Insurance Podcast

ReadyChek Has Your Solution To...

February 11, 2022 John Farquhar & Chris Harris Season 2 Episode 17
Trucking Risk and Insurance Podcast
ReadyChek Has Your Solution To...
Show Notes Transcript

Michelle and Chad from ReadyChek join us on the show this week to discuss how companies can benefit from better Vehicle Inspections.

30 Days FREE, use promo code SD22,
https://www.readychek.com

John Farquhar
Summit Risk Solutions: summitrisksolutions.ca
1 226 802-2762
John@summitrisksolutions.ca
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-farquhar-9b88771a2/?originalSubdomain=ca

Chris Harris
Safety Dawg Inc: safetydawg.com
Chris@SafetyDawg.com
1 905 973 7056
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3764255/admin/

Welcome to another episode of the trucking risk and insurance podcast. Thanks for joining us today. Today. I'm excited to have my co-host Johnny <em></em> of course, from summit risk solutions and we have ReadyChek for those of you who haven't heard of ReadyChek before. I think you're going to find this quite interesting. Let me see if I've done this right. Hey, I did this right horn and Johnny I'm here. I'm here. I fed the squirrels two extra peanuts. I tell ya. You just, you anyways. Hey Chad. And I know Michelle is there with you. Good morning. Good morning. Yay. The better looking half Michelle. Good morning. You guys. Hi, Chris, How are you all doing this morning chat and Michelle. Oh, we're doing pretty good. That's Friday. So that's always a nice part of the week. Of course. Ooh, it's Friday. We all got to love for who doesn't love. Well, hold it. We're all. Self-employed who here works on Saturdays. We do. I was gonna say, come on now. I usually put a good seven or eight hours in, on a Saturday as well. So, you know, I, I prefer not to work Saturdays or Sundays and I'm really working hard at not working Fridays anymore. So my new Friday is going to be Thursday. Hey, Wow. That's amazing. Congratulations, Sean. We're trying, I haven't succeeded. I was going to say, I'm not sure that we're all as rich as John, that we can get this Rich though. It's more like stupid. All right. We're here to talk about ReadyChek. Ready? Well, Chad, how long has ReadyChek been operating and who is your typical? Well, let, let's start it off with who's your typical customer. Who's ready. Tech check targeting and why? Right. So ReadyChek has a product, obviously that helps you record your vehicle inspections and hours of service. Don't say obviously people don't know about ReadyChek. I know that radio check has this product, so what's the product that ReadyChek has. Okay. So ReadyChek has a vehicle inspection and hours of service app for everybody who is one 60 or less. So everybody drives around town landscapers. Yeah, that's great. Excellent. Sorry. I said Lana landscapers bus companies. So for example, there's a number of companies that shuttle people around who, who, who might have trouble getting around and salts, right? So we have a number of those customers, limousine customers, garbage disposal, companies, everybody, you see cable, cable contractors that get contracted for bell and Rogers, those types of customers and yeah, the, the one 60 guys and there's, and there's, there's a lot of them. Can you, can you like municipality operations, the hydro trucks, those guys? Can I use that as well? Absolutely. Yeah. They can use that for instructions and school Buses. Yes. Schedule two or schedule three or five and 6, 7, 6. Yeah. Cool. And Ken, if I'm from Alberta, can I use it? Yes, absolutely. We've got a, an NSC standard 13 as part of the app too. So we do have a number of customers from the last there now. So that's great. NSC is national safety code just to translate for anybody, because if we're talking to the people in the one 60, they may not be our typical trucker type of person. So they may not know about all these different acronyms, Right. What's a vehicle inspection, for example. Right. So I think there's a great video that just came out yesterday. I believe that talks about the importance of vehicle inspections, but that's, you know, it's, it's just, and who has to do them. Right. But it's a, it's, it's a, it's a, you know, an inspection where you walk around your vehicle or you walk around your trailer and you make sure that that there's no broken parts. There's a number of there's 23 different inspection points that you need to check. And yeah. And, and of course, with ReadyChek, you can quickly record the results of your inspection in our app. And well, let me say this there's 23 points, but if I don't go past the one 60, you know, like I'm driving a, a heavy pickup truck, for example, maybe it's a dually and yeah, it's over 4,500 kg. The register grows weight, but I mean, come on, it's a pickup truck. I just, you know, I'm a driver. I, I get in there and it's all good to go. I just drive. I was going to say, you probably got a G license, so you're not even a commercial driver. So what the heck? Exactly. Johnny. I mean, G licensed drivers, they're used to hopping into their car every morning and unless it doesn't start, they don't know if the lights are working typically or, you know, so what's the difference if I'm driving a pickup truck? Well, there, there really isn't. I mean, I guess if for me, I'm driving a pickup truck everyday too, but mine's not a CVOR pickup truck. Right. So I haven't registered and registered my business commercial use. So if you're, if your vehicle is registered for commercial use, then yeah, you need to do this inspection. You need to make sure that everything is in working order your tires, not going to fall off the truck while you're driving down the road or your load's not secure, or your, your lights or tail lights. I saw this the other day, just driving through Waterloo is that I saw a truck in the distance. I'm like that guy's tail lights are out right now. I pull up beside him and sure enough, he was a C4 vehicle. That's out of service. That guy, I didn't look, didn't check didn't care. I mean, it's, it's there to keep us all safe. Then I, you know, I understand that, you know, a lot of, a lot of people do it, do the, do the inspections only because the government, you know, mandates that you have to do them and write checks here to make it as easy as possible. Right? So you don't have to memorize anything everything's in the app that you need to inspect all the possible defects, major and minor, all listed there. There's no guessing you're not, you know, we're not hiding any information for me. If you pick a major defect, it'll say, Hey, your, your vehicles out of service, you can't drive this. Right. So go pick another one. Well, I was just thinking you could, I I'm thinking of an outfit or a couple of different outfits that could, could utilize this, this tool. And they're not even required by law to complete a vehicle inspection. So it would be a best practice in their case. And I'm thinking of like a commercial operation. They run around, do service work and they run in these little service vans, but it's actually going to be a client here that I'm going to work with them. One of their problems is the drivers are ignoring the vehicles. Totally. And they're having maintenance issues, collisions, crashes, all this kinds of stuff. And it's silly little things like they don't even know they have a headlight out. They don't have a tail light out whatnot, and they don't know what to do. And that's where I'm going to go in and talk to them. And one of the things I'm going to bring up is I think, ReadyChek could fix your problems because now it'll help you and guide you to do that inspection. And you don't record that. You did it. Yeah. And then the other thing too, is we'll, we'll notify. And let's say that the, the safety manager, or whoever's responsible for the vehicles to get email, go directly to them. So, and when somebody reports that that headlight is out within seconds, after it's reported, it'll appear as an email in their inbox. And they'll say, oh, look, you know, truck number one, the front left hit our phone line, headlights out. I'll I'll I can schedule that for maintenance or, or the park. So that's available my, my mechanic to fix, or whoever does your, your maintenance. Right? So, and then after that, too, when it's, when the maintenance is actually completed, you, you can record other in the app or using our web portal that the repairs were made so that when you go to that facility audit later in the year, or whenever it happens, you can provide, wait, look. Yeah, it was reported in the morning. We fixed it that night. We recorded it here in the, in the inspection. And we're good, messed up facility audit with flying colors. It was from our, I like it. I like it. That's what I was going to ask Johnny, how does this, you know, immediate traceable, recording and reporting to the management and then a way to document it. How does that affect an MTO audit or court action? Oh, very much. So, just like, look at Chad. He has just changed his whole appearance here on the podcast. And it's amazing. We don't have this happen very often. So, so, but no great tool, Chad, because that is exactly what you're trying to do is accountability between reporting and recording. And I think that's one of the things we see a downfall in, in the industry is drivers might record the defect, but they're not necessarily reporting it to somebody. And We actually customer that. We actually have a customer that does have both CVOR and non CVR vehicles. And they do checks on all of the vehicles because they found that they were Perfect. Sorry, Michelle, we didn't get that answer or your comment because I went and accidentally muted you. Right. I, I know I'm, I'm sorry, button. I went, oh shit. And I was like swearing under my breath. Yeah. Well it was okay. I was reading her lips so I can tell you what she said. Here you go. I'm going to translate Michelle. The last thing I heard you say was you had a customer that has both CVOR and non CVOR vehicles and, And they use them. They use ReadyChek for all of them to make sure, because they were finding that they were having vehicle difficulties with the non CVR vans and trucks, but they were not being told about it by the drivers. And it wasn't being found until someone else needed to use it. And then they found out that there was a problem. So they use us for all of their vehicles regardless of CVOR or not. That's awesome. And I happen to know that it's your app has grown and expanded at the moment. And first of all, we'll talk about something that I Cray we are all tired of. And that would be COVID. But tell us what you quickly were able to develop for the app. Oh yeah. Right. So early last year, obviously with COVID we, we added the ability to do a check in, we call it where we will before you can do anything. So, so we built a workflow into the app to so, so that you can't make violations. Right? So one of the, one of the things that we've done is we've said, if you have our check-in feature enabled in the product, that's the first thing you need to do in the morning. Before you can create an inspection before you can do your hours of service, you need to do a check-in. And here it is up on the screen. And, and what this does is is you, you click that open button and it takes you to the government, your provincial government's website that has the COVID screening form. So we're in Ontario right now. If you were to click that button, he would take you to the Ontario screening form. You just fill it out. And he would tell you whether or not you could work, we don't record any of that information. So we don't have any personal health information on the device or know of it. All we do is say, Hey, did you take, did you finish the form? You say, yes, you say, are you allowed to work? Are you allowed to go into work? And you can say yes, and then you sign it and you save your, your manager, whoever you want that information to go to. And that's all that gets back to them to no personal health information is shared. It just says that you're available to work that day. And yeah. And then, and then once you, once you completed that, you can then move on to our hours of service product and onto our, our vehicle inspection product. That's also part of the app. So, so yeah, so that was a, that's a neat little thing that we do. And it's a very handy, a lot of companies, they were using like text messaging, like in the morning they had all their employees like text somebody and of course they would forget and, and whatever else. So this just made it nice and handy that, that this was the first thing that they do when they wake up in the morning or when they go to get in their truck. And they know they have to do a vehicle inspection because they're at home with their vehicle. Well, the first thing they need to do is do that. Check-in to say that they're okay to work, right. And then once that's done, then they can move on. If they have the hours, hours of service enabled, they can start their hours of service. And, and then after that they can start therapy, vehicle inspection. John, you had a question about hours of service didn't you about the app? Yeah, it does. It, does it do anything as far as, you know, tracking some hours of service or, or even just, you know, when I start my day, because within your one 60, we're still required to monitor how much we work. So we might not necessarily have to complete ODA a log book or an ELD, but we do need to note when we started our day and when we finished our day kind of time markers and whatnot. So does it, does it do anything along that line chat? Yeah. That's exactly what it does, John. So when, so again, just going back to that workflow, what way we made it? If you have hours of service, sorry, enabled on the app, you can't actually do your inspection until you start your hours of service, right? Cause you, when you start your inspection, you're, you're on duty. You're not driving while you're on duty. And, and from our experience that our customers experience a number of them got busted for that, because what they do is they would do their inspection. It hop in their truck, they drive to work, they punch in and that could be a half hour. Right. And so the MTO would, would, would notice that and say, okay guys, what's going on here? Like there's the half hour of on driving tonight. That's missing. So, so what we did with the app is, that's why we've got this workflow. So when you come in, you did that check in which we just saw. Now you have to do hours of service. So you, you start your hours of service. You press that. It's super easy. We just we've been iterating quickly to get this workflow. But you see today's, we've got a grid graph just like everybody's used to seeing. Right. But you don't fill it out. It's all digital. You press, you press this, you press the start button and it pops up and it says, okay, where's your start location. So, or the one 60 guys, they don't have to record their locations where they switch duty status. They just have to record the interview status. Right. So, so what we do is we say, okay, you're starting your day. So where's your start location. And then we have some helper buttons that that'll, that'll say other they're at HQ, they're at home. They're, they're just somewhere in the world so they can just press them and get you yes, look up. And then, and then, so they press that and they, then they press save. And that starts the hours of service log for the day. Right. And, and then after that, it enables three buttons on the front of the screen on duty, on duty driving and then off duty. And then, so you just have, you, you can imagine you have your phone up in your, in your vehicle, somewhere stuck to the dashboard, let's say, or even down below. And, and when you start driving, you get in, you press on driving. And then when you get to your location, you press on duty. Right. And we recorded as you could go very similar to an ELD, right. It's just, we're not, we're not connected to the vehicle. Right. So that a lot of these ELBs are connected to the vehicle. So as soon as you turn your car on for your vehicle, I should say, it says, oh, Hey, I noticed that the engine's on. So I'm going to say, you're off, you're on duty driving. So we just don't have that time right now, but we have everything else. So, so really is, is very ELD, like just a whole lot simpler to use designed for the one 60 days. Sorry, then just wrap that up. You'll see the grid graph will fill out during the day. So you'll see off duty on duty. You take, you know, driving, you take a break for lunch, we'll go back to off duty, let's say for your lunch, so forth and so on. Just so you can imagine the grid graph in your head. And then when you're done for the day, you go back to the shop. You say, you're on duty, you clean up or whatever. Go home, you press off duty. You press finish your record, your finished location. You press save and you're done for the day after you sign it after you sign it. Yes. Sorry. That's simple. And there's no, Yay. No rulers, No crayons. Well, I just wanted to highlight an interesting thing that I hadn't thought of before that. Yeah. A lot of guys take the company, truck home, park it in the driveway because we're talking about smaller vehicles. We're talking about vans and pickup trucks and yeah, they've got to do a vehicle inspection once every 24 hours, just like everybody else does. And yes, they're probably, I hope they're doing it in their driveway before they drive the vehicle. And yeah, I had forgotten about that piece of going from the driveway to the shop. That's, on-duty sorry. That's driving time and yeah. MTO can really smack you for well, you know, cause I'm from the trucking side of things, I don't have a lot of customers that fit this mold. It is a gap that I can see a lot of companies failing an audit for, you know, because the driver is driving a truck and then stopping and record it. Yup. Yup. And that's how we, that's how we got our very, very first customer back in 2019 was a company in London. They, they had this problem. They, they cause they, they let all their drivers take the trucks home. Right. And they were doing that. They were doing their vehicles, vehicle inspection, but they were using that clock in time when they arrived at work at six 30 or seven o'clock in the morning as their, as their start time. And, and that's, they got busted for that. So when they said, Hey, this was our problem hours. Like, okay, well we can help you with that. And, and that was, that was the initial four. Yeah. Four hours of service. Hey cool. You know, and I'm sorry, in my mind, I'm now going. I used to live beside a neighbor that worked for not halt and region. I forget what region Burlington is, but he worked for the Burlington city, the region. And when he was on duty on the weekends, he brought the truck home all the time and it's not there in his driveway unless he had an emergency call that he had to go out and take care of. You know, I can see a lot of people being affected by that. That's a huge can of worms, you know, source, let me throw this here. Andrew's got a question for you, Chad, will this work in every province? Yeah, absolutely. The only, the only caveat to that is, is Quebec. We haven't added there a heavy list. Sorry. There are heavy vehicle list to that, but we, we can't do that. If we get, get, get, get, get a Quebec customer, but it would be an, a, it would be an English. So hopefully that's okay. But we could, you know, if the customer is big enough, I'd definitely add French. Well, Andrew, you may not know Andrew, John and I both know Andrew and he's from troublemaker, Troublemaker. He mustache sure. You know, like he, he, he's asking on behalf of all Albertans and maybe those Columba and BC. So the answer was Andrew. Yes. It will. It conforms to the national safety code. It is not an ELD. However, it makes an easy job of tracking hours of service. Yeah. Instead of doing it, like we heard Michelle say, we don't need a ruler. Well, it digitizes the whole process. So it makes it just that much easier to tap the button, tap the button, move on. You know, so instead of me having to draw some lines for the day or just marking, when I go on duty off duty throughout the day, this simplifies the process. Why not so easy. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and because you're within the one 60 rule, there's no requirement for an electronic logging device. So it's the perfect tool to simplify the paper tracking basis. Yeah. And, and, and you've got to remember too, and you know, we've, we've helped people understand different customers, understand that, that, you know, technically in the regulations, the driver doesn't need to keep track of their, their duty status, but the company does. Right. Right. So when we say that they, they look at us like, oh really? We're like, yeah, we have this. Are you tracking it? When you can ask your driver to track it? And then just the results every day. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just to be clear, the regulations say that the driver doesn't have to do a log book, but the company needs to know how much time the drivers spent in each duty status, as it says in the rig. So yeah. And many companies go, oh really? And so this is the issue that ReadyChek has tackled and solved. Exactly. Yeah. And it's funny when you, when you mentioned that to them, there's a little light bulb moment. They're like, wow. Okay. And then, you know, then they embrace it full, full, full on. Perfect. Chad, Michelle. Cool. Last word, Michelle. You're so much easier on the eyes. And Chad is, let me tell you, He just has a big net that takes up the whole screen. Did you have to have the doorways in the house enlarged a little bit With the app in general, it's really simplified for several of our newest customers, how much things are going in a, in a digital direction. And for them getting rid of the paper, being able to track that the trucks and the vehicles with their defects, knowing when they need to do maintenance, things like that, for problems that they've seen, like they're super happy with the ability to do all of this digitally. Because as Chad mentioned earlier, one of them was having to text all the drivers every day. Hey, can you go in for COVID B, have you checked the vehicle? Like, so they just weren't getting their inspection information back in time. Some of them weren't doing it in terms of hours of service, they didn't know until they talk with us about starting the inspection work. We mentioned, do you need our hours of service as well? They said, no, we don't, you know, we don't go over one 60. And I said, okay, the drivers aren't going to get pulled over and asked for their hours of service. But if you have a facility audit, you will be asked for their hours of service. And it's like, oh. And so they went and I had them speak with tri shield, our partner working on try show consulting. And they do a lot of consulting, helping people understand what they need for their audits. So she spoke with them and she called us back and said, okay, so I need your hours of service. You know, they, they check everything now. And it's, it's, it's been a huge workflow improvement for their processes. So I feel like we've hit everything on this. I just wanted to throw Andrew's comment on the screen there as well. The, you know, the inspection can be tracked in, recorded in the maintenance as well. So yes, it all can be. Thanks Andrew. So Michelle, Chad, thanks so much for coming on to the trucking risk and insurance podcast. I know I screwed this up a little bit. The presentation part of it. I tried to figure out what he noticed. Yeah, we were. So We went looking at how good looking Chad is. Well, that may be well, okay. That's Oh, is it really is a lot bigger when you look at it that way. All right guys. And of course your contact information will be below. And by the way, for our listeners, if they wanted to get a free month of service, just to try it out, there is a discount code. SD 22, I think was a gen SDI. Imagine as these stands for safety dawg and then 22 is a year or so as D 22, to get a free month of service, we'll click on the link down below. If, if you are a company that doesn't go beyond the one 60 and needs help in tracking your maintenance, your vehicle inspections, your hours of service, and even COVID give, ready, check a try guys. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Johnny, last word, Johnny. You going down to the border? No, God, no, I, I can't leave the house cause I don't have my ReadyChek app to inspect my vehicle or start my hours of service for the day. So I'm just home-bound yup. Yup. I'm wearing pants, so we're good, but yeah, I'm just going to stay And you sold, sold sled. So you can't go up. I can't go snowmobile no more. So we're, you know, we're, we're waiting for the snow to melt so we can get the new Toyota. All right guys. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend.