MPAQ Dispatch Features
See illustrations and additional details in next section: SOFTWARE
Download PDF document describing a tipical CONFIGURATIONEntering orders
- Retrieve information on the customer that is calling.
- Calculate the volume of concrete to fill the order.
- Select mix designs and extra products included in the order.
- Retrieve prices for each item on COD orders, including discounts, taxes and surcharges.
- Enter delivery address, instructions, contacts and other info to print on delivery ticket.
- Retrieve and print a Google (or Mpaquest) map for the job address.
- Keep track of tickets sent to multiple plants when servicing a large job.
- View/Print a continuous log of all loads.
Scheduling
- Use the truck demand graph when taking a new order to visually find the best spots on your daily schedule. This graph shows in real time the necessary number of trucks to dispatch your orders (both committed orders and will-call’s).
- Anticipate a shortage (or excess) of trucks well in advance to help resolving situations before they happen.
- For orders with multiple deliveries, setup spacing between loads, approximate driving time and unload time, while observing its effects on the truck demand graph.
- Organize your driver call-in schedule for next day.
- Visualize where and when you have excess trucks at end of the day.
Sending tickets
- Send tickets directly to a batch computer to start loading the next truck. The batcher at the plant only needs to select the ticket received and proceed to batch it, no data entry is necessary.
- Color coded prompts anticipate when to send the next ticket for each job in progress.
- Send tickets to your a local plant or to a remote plant when dispatching a job from two plants. All deliveries are tallied to prevent over/under dispatching.
- Easily cancel and re-send a ticket when necessary.
Tracking deliveries
- Know at any time the current status for each truck using GPS head-units in your trucks. In case your trucks don’t have head-units, the system can show where your trucks should be according to times estimated at time of order.
- Know at a glance if a truck is late at any stage of the delivery by watching color coded indicators.
- Know how much time remains for a truck to advance to its next stage of the delivery.
- Reshuffle job schedules using a context-sensitive menu (right mouse click).
Display all recorded times for each stage by simply selecting any truck.- Send text messages from your dispatch screen to truck head-units.
- Receive preset messages from truck units regarding left-over concrete and other useful information.
Logging and reporting
- View all tickets issued for current day, previous days or for any date range.
- Drill through on a report to show all details on any ticket. The ticket can be also reprinted or even stored as a new order that you can modify and reuse.
- Print a ticket-by-ticket report continuously if you need to generate a paper trail in real time.
- Monitor the all important yards (or meters) per driver hour to optimize your fleet.
- Print a profit report by customer/job including prices and costs such as raw ingredients, delivery rates, plant fixed costs per unit and more.
- Display/print reports on an individual client or job for a given date range.
- List all changes done to program settings using the Audit Log function.
Interfacing to accounting
- Send all ticket data to your accounting software to expedite invoicing, reduce errors and eliminate issues such as lost tickets.
- Interface to QuickBooks, Accpac and other leading accounting software.
- Send exported data files directly to your accounting computer via network.
Sending mix designs and extra products
- Full mix design database allows central storage for all ingredients and targets.
- Send mix designs from your dispatch to any batch computer compatible with the industry standard U-Link protocol.
- Choice of sending material targets embedded with each ticket or transferring mixes from your database to keep your plants updated. When sending mixes to our batch system, the received mix is always stored/updated in the batch computer database.
- Send extra product codes with each ticket.
- Fine tune the proportion of replacement cementitious material for each order, to account for daily temperature changes.
- Trim water target for each job.
- Add or trim admixtures for each job.
Software
Job List
Shows today’s jobs, jobs within a group and a date range. The list can be sorted by selecting the desired column. Row colors reflect Job Status, such as ‘On Hold’, ‘Will Call’, ‘In Progress’, or ‘Done’.
To send a ticket to a plant, the dispatcher selects one of the jobs and clicks the ‘Dispatch’ button on the right. The next window allows to send the ticket.
Load Setup / Send Ticket
The ticket is ready to send by clicking on the “Dispatch” button, however, before sending the ticket you can easily pick a different truck, revise the amount, add extra products, compensate for returned concrete or trim the water. Then one click on the next window will send it to the pre-assigned plant, or to another plant when dispatching a Job from multiple plants.
Job Edit
This is the main order entry window to enter a new order of modify an existing order.
You can also customize water and admixtures, include extra products, schedule the job, enter pricing for COD tickets.
Job Pricing, Extra Products, COD tickets
In order to print prices on COD tickets, simply select any applicable extra products or charges from a list. Items are automatically multiplied by the CY/M3 of concrete. Items can also be priced by the truckload or by number of units manually assigned to a ticket. This function can also be used to print a ‘point of sale’ ticket for miscellaneous products that do not involve concrete.
When exporting ticket data to accounting, ‘Charge’ tickets are usually priced by your accounting system at time of invoicing and according to product codes, discounts and other rules, therefore the MPAQ system does not normally print prices for Charge transactions.
Truck Tracking
This window shows a detailed view of all your trucks, jobs and plants. You can also set it up to show only the plant(s) you are handling.
Plant lines (1) show amounts delivered/ordered, number of active trucks , trucks in use and trucks in yard. All dispatch operators can see this information, promoting better collaboration between all plants.
Underneath each plant line, job lines (2) show the client name, amounts delivered/ordered and time to send the ticket for the next load, highlighted in red if late (4).
The truck cells (3) show truck number and time counters (in minutes) for the delivery stage: negative times mean “still under the estimated time”, positive times mean “over the estimated time” and are highlighted in orange. Trucks move automatically to the next stage based on info retrieved from truck head-units (5), or in their absence, trucks can be moved either by hand or by estimated times entered on the order.
Convenient “right-click” context sensitive menus access the most common functions such as display job details, change schedule, delete/change a truck or cancel a ticket.
When trucks are back “In yard”, they conveniently stay under their same job line, a valuable indication if you want to reuse the same truck for the next load of the same job.Scheduling jobs and anticipating the truck demand.
Setting up the time for a delivery can be done with 2 clicks. For jobs with multiple deliveries, you can also set the travel time, spacing between loads, and the pouring time. Based on these times, the truck demand graph at the right shows how many trucks and at what time of the day you will need. This helps in resolving scheduling issues well before they happen (red peak in graph).
While scheduling one job you also see the total demand generated by all other jobs: solid colors for committed jobs, faded colors for “will call” jobs. You can also schedule jobs for next day or any other day.
The truck demand graph can also be a separate floating window showing the demand for one -or several- plants at a time.More
There are many features not mentioned in this page. For more details, please call us to arrange an on-line meeting and demo.
Job Scheduling, Truck Demand
Setting up the time for a delivery can be done with 2 clicks. For jobs with multiple deliveries, you can also set the travel time, spacing between loads, and the pouring time. Based on these times, the truck demand graph at the right shows how many trucks and at what time of the day you will need. This helps in resolving scheduling issues well before they happen (red peak in graph).
While scheduling one job you also see the total demand generated by all other jobs: solid colors for committed jobs, faded colors for “will call” jobs. You can also schedule jobs for next day or any other day.
The truck demand graph can also be a separate floating window showing the demand for one -or several- plants at a time.
More...
There are many features not mentioned in this page. For more details, please call us at 1-888-672-0349 to arrange an on-line meeting and demo.
