When something goes wrong on the road, Trengrove Transport hears about it before the customer does. Here is how the Christchurch carrier uses Hitrak, the transport management system (TMS) for freight carriers built in New Zealand, to lift service reliability.

The customer

Trengrove Transport is a Christchurch-based carrier serving businesses across the Canterbury region. Like most regional operators, its reputation rests on one thing: whether freight arrives when and how the customer expects.

The challenge

In a road freight operation, things go wrong every day: a truck is delayed, a delivery cannot be completed, a consignment is damaged or short. The problem is rarely the exception itself; it is how long it takes the operations team to find out. When the first signal is an unhappy customer ringing in, the carrier is already on the back foot.

What Trengrove did

Trengrove Transport moved its operation onto Hitrak, with real-time exception alerting switched on across every job. Because Hitrak captures each event on a consignment as it happens, from dispatch through to the driver's electronic proof of delivery, the platform can raise an alert the moment something departs from plan rather than waiting for a paper run sheet to come back at the end of the day.

• Every exception on the road (a failed or late delivery, a damaged or short consignment, a variation from the planned run) is surfaced to the operations team in real time.
• The team can act immediately: re-route, re-book, or contact the customer before the customer contacts them.
• Customers receive electronic proof of delivery directly, reducing the volume of "where is my freight" enquiries.

The result

Problems are now resolved while they are still small, and customers hear from Trengrove first. Trengrove Transport has built up thousands of five-star customer reviews while operating on the platform, and credits real-time exception alerting as the key factor in responding to road incidents before customers are affected.

"It lets us react instantly. It's significantly improved our service reliability. Our customers have noticed the difference."

Ben Trengrove, General Manager, Trengrove Transport