TruckPay on the Growth and Importance of e-Ticketing in Demolition
February 21, 2023
Demo on Demand caught up with the president and CEO of TruckPay Inc., Barry Honig, to discuss his company, the evolution of e-ticketing in the industry, and how a new point-of-sale system promotes safety and increases business efficiency. TruckPay is exhibiting at Demolition Phoenix on Feb. 22-25. Stop by Booth 1028 to learn more.
Tell me a bit about TruckPay. When was it founded, and why is it needed?
TruckPay was founded in October 2015 by myself and my son Benjamin. My nephew had asked me to help him buy a dump truck in Houston, as he wanted to get into the earth-moving business. I went down to Houston and bought him a used Kenworth dump truck, and he started moving loads. He told Benjamin and me about how the business worked, how everyone was using paper tickets to confirm pickups and deliveries of loads, how tickets could get lost, and how drivers, sometimes, would just make them up for work that wasn’t necessarily done. He asked Benjamin, who had been developing apps since he was 15 years old, and who was also a two-time Apple World Wide Development Conference (WWDC) Scholarship winner, if there was an app that could be used to replace paper tickets. There wasn’t one, and based on my background in the financial services industry — where I was one of the first people to build a fully electronic foreign exchange trading system and where I served as a consultant to several banks in eliminating paper tickets from stock trading — I realized that we could digitize the bulk logistics industry.
TruckPay was originally built and designed to eliminate the use of paper tickets from the aggregates industry and to provide an online marketplace where contractors and trucking companies could hire dump truck drivers to do specific jobs. We expanded the platform to handle the transport of hazardous and nonhazardous materials, scrap metal and recycling, and, of course, C&D. Over the last few years, we have also expanded the platform to handle asphalt and ready-mix and to even support the agriculture industry. TruckPay was needed then, and is greatly needed now, to promote safety. It keeps drivers, foremen and inspectors safely in their trucks and greatly improves the operational efficiency and profitability of any company involved in the transport and weighing of bulk materials.
How does TruckPay, and specifically its new point-of-sale (POS) system, promote safety?
TruckPay’s new POS system is based on our groundbreaking, triply patented MyTruckScales platform, which is an NTEP-certified, contactless truck scale management system. MyTruckScales enables drivers to stay safely in their trucks, for example, when getting weighed, when purchasing materials or when dumping at a landfill. The POS completely eliminates the need for paper scale tickets, which also eliminates the need for physical kiosks, printers and for scale-house PC servers. Drivers no longer have to either get in and out of their trucks or lean out their windows to operate the kiosk and get a printed ticket. Everything the driver needs to do is on their mobile device. They can just get a weighment, purchase materials, get paid for scrap metal that they’re bringing into a yard, pay dump fees at a transfer station or landfill, or perform any type of weighment workflow the scale owner requires. Our POS not only greatly improves driver safety, but it also greatly improves the yard, quarry, landfill or any other facility that is using a truck scale.
Our MyTruckScales’ POS system can be used in either a fully unattended mode or with remote weighmasters in locations where weighmasters are required. In this case, one weighmaster can be used to monitor multiple scales, saving tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, per year on labor costs.
How might a demolition contractor use TruckPay?
A demolition contractor can use TruckPay to manage their fleet of dump trucks or roll-offs, for example, to hire IOO drivers or subcontractors, through our electronic marketplace to do work for them, while eliminating paper tickets. They can use our hazardous and nonhazardous e-manifests to automatically generate and file Environmental Protection Agency-required electronic manifests rather than using those six-page manifests that are used today. They, of course, can use our MyTruckScales and new POS system to purchase, be paid for and dump materials.
What are the latest TruckPay solutions that demolition contractors might want to know about?
Our new POS is truly revolutionary, as it is the only POS that allows the driver to stay safely in their truck when engaging in any type of transaction that involves a truck scale and allows for quick modern electronic payments for the transaction. Our new POS allows scale owners and their customers, for the first time, to do bulk material transactions the same way you order food at a restaurant or buy products online.
All of TruckPay’s products are multi-lingual, multi-metric and multi-currency, which means that they can be easily used by any company that operates outside of the U.S. or that has a multi-national footprint.
How do you envision e-ticketing and other technology changes advancing in the next five to 10 years?
The use of e-ticketing will enable businesses to use sophisticated data analysis to better understand and predict needs for materials, supply and demand of drivers, in specific regions of the country, to share data throughout the industry, up and down the supply chain to make operations more efficient. Think of how financial institutions communicate with each other or how companies like Amazon and other retailers manage inventories. With the growing use of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, the ability and need for these trucks to be weighed and to manage/record pickups and deliveries can only be done through e-tickets. TruckPay owns the patent for the weighing of autonomous and semi-autonomous trucks. This technology is embedded in our new POS, so autonomous trucks will be able to pick up or dump materials and fully complete all aspects of the payments involved with the transaction. E-tickets will also enable information from other connected Internet of Things (IOT) devices, such as intelligent compaction, the automatic recording of the types of materials that are to be recycled or dumped, after a structure has been demolished, how efficiently loaders and dump trucks are working together, etc.
What’s on the horizon for TruckPay?
We will continue to do what we do best, which is to be leading innovators in bulk logistics technology. We will continue to provide solutions that will keep drivers and everyone involved in the movement, weighing, and buying and selling of bulk materials safe while helping our clients earn more money. Our mission is to help evolve the verticals that we serve into the safest and most efficient industries in the country. We also anticipate having our technology used in academic studies to fully understand the impact and cost efficiency of recycling.