Diamond Tank Rental Inc. can be found in the oil fields of Texas doing a little of everything and anything. They have gone through some massive growth in recent years, actually quadrupling in size. We stopped in to get the insider scoop from an interview with Cary.
Q&A
Tell us about yourself and the company.
My name is Cary Thornton. I am the HSC/HR Manager for Diamond Tank Rental Inc. in Odessa, Texas.
I have been with the company for over 13 years and have watched us grow from a small company to a pretty large company now. I don’t wear just one hat. I do dispatching; I do sales, safety, HR, truck registration, fuel mileage – you name it. We have really evolved since I’ve been here, not because of me, but because of the hard work of everybody around here. We have diversified considerably since we first started. When I started, we were just doing hauling, tank rental, and a little bit of backhoe work. Different little stuff like that. And now we are a full-fledged oilfield service company. We have tank rentals, light tower and generator rentals; we have a construction crew that builds oilfield lease roads and locations. We have a rig-moving division that we started 2 or 3 years ago that has grown our business incredibly. Now we have somewhere around 140 employees, compared to when I first started, it was probably less than 40 people. We started using Axon in November of 2009.
Tell us about your experience with Axon Software.
I first got a hold of Axon when I was looking for a way to improve our dispatch and communications. We had problems with communicating. We were so busy – I would get a load and the person across from me wouldn’t know that I had a load and might have booked a customer for that. So, I started looking into Axon and got them to give me a demo. We started with the demo about a year prior to us actually purchasing. We went through a downturn right before and decided to put it on the shelf when, all of a sudden, our owner came to me and asked if we wanted to check back into this software and go with it. I was shocked and surprised. We did it and it was a little rough at first, the learning curve going from a non-computerized business to a computerized business. Like I said though, we have grown immensely since then. We have not had any trouble, other than teaching people how to use it, because it is so diverse in what it does.
What are some of the problems that Axon Software helped you solve?
We couldn’t do reporting or looking back before. If we wanted to find out how much a truck made or how much we did for a company, it was all paper and it took hours to research something like that. With Axon, we can literally do it within a few minutes. That has been tremendous. We know where our trucks are now, and we didn’t know that back then – it was all in the minds of the two people that did it. If anybody else came in, they wouldn’t know what we were doing. We had about a hundred tanks when we first started with Axon, plus around 35 trucks, and now we are up to 580 pieces of equipment. We have added 2 people in the accounting region of the company.
Has Axon Software changed the way you do your invoicing? The speed and the amount of work involved?
Considerably, because we used to handwrite our invoices. We did a pre-invoice and the invoice, so we were doing double duty. Now it’s done for us. We only have to put it in one time and there is no repetition of paperwork. I was at a company once where we had to put in a job 3 separate times with a 4th step that was the invoice.
Has the way you do owner operator statements changed?
Oh, that is about ten times faster than it used to be. We used to have to fill out reports by hand, do all this research, and then come up with a payment for them, find all of their payments that they owed us – anything that was a credit to them. Now it’s automatic. Everything. The fuel is integrated and that is probably my greatest joy with having Axon. Our fuel is brought in, imported into the system, and I don’t have to worry about anybody’s fuel. It goes straight into each truck’s inventory, and the owner operators are charged automatically for their fuel, whereas before we had to do that manually and it took considerably more time.
Would you say Axon Software has paid for itself?
At our size, without Axon, we would probably need at least 5 to 10 more people. I don’t get into the numbers like our manager does, but I can tell by what we have done that we have saved a ton of money on time and on people. People are expensive, and pay is much higher than other areas of the country because we have to pay that to get them here. You’re looking at a minimum of $40-50,000 a year per person, so 5 to 10 people extra would be a considerable amount of money per year. Axon pays for itself pretty quickly.
Has Axon Software helped you maintain or improve your customer service?
It helps us because we can look at our computer and see instantly where our trucks are at. We have a GPS system. If we have a call and want to know where our truck is, we can look in first to see whose job he is on and what time he should be through, and then we can go to our GPS and see if he is really there. It is a way for us to police what we’re doing, but it also helps our customers because we can tell them when that truck will be through.
If someone in the industry asked you about Axon Software, what would you say?
I have recommended Axon to a couple of different companies in the past. I highly recommend it because they would instantly see the benefits of it. The growth that we’ve had, we wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing today without Axon. Even if we had different software, it wouldn’t have been real-time. This is the only real-time software company I found when I was looking. I like that you can change something, and it’s instantly updated to everyone.
