By Rick Stoff
James Colley was working for a freight forwarding company in New Zealand in 2015 and noticed how much time drivers spent walking around their trucks.
“They carried a pen and paper with one of those forms that makes a carbon copy. I thought, this was a bit crazy. I asked them how often they do this, and they said every single day. I said, ‘You’re kidding me? There has got to be a better solution out in the market,'” he recalled.
“I did a lot of market research and, lo and behold, there was nothing like it, no cloud-based solution that was easy to set up and run with. We decided to build a prototype. We had a launch product that was a very basic version of what we have today.”
The product is Whip Around, a mobile app that handles daily vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs) on smartphones through a mobile app. The company is based in Auckland, New Zealand, but the product’s acceptance in the U.S. has resulted in a North American headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., for sales, marketing and customer service staff.
Whip Around has entered an exclusive arrangement that makes the software available to United Motorcoach Association members at a lifetime discount.
“About ninety-nine percent of our business comes out of the United States,” Colley says. “I can’t give you number of customers, but we are in excess of three thousand businesses on the system. We are growing at just under forty percent month-to-month. and our staff is doubling every two months.”
Whip Around’s acceptance in the U.S. is credited to its elimination of paperwork and its compliance with federal DVIR regulations. The latter benefit was not envisioned in the early product plans.
“We were working with a company called Anheuser-Busch, a big drink business in the States. They told us it needs to meet DVIR regulations and we said, ‘What’s that?’ We kind of stumbled across that and saw that this compliance could be a serious business and we started focusing on that,” he said.
The software then was modified to follow Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations for DVIR documentation, including the ability to file digital driver and mechanic signatures.
“It is fully customizable for fleets,” Colley said. “From a portal, managers are able to create forms through a drag-and-drop creator. They can take any paper from their business and build it into the Whip Around software.
“Then the drivers download a mobile app, select the form they want and select from a list of vehicles. They are able to see a previous inspection report and see any outstanding defects on that vehicle. Then they are able to conduct a pre-trip, post-trip or any type of inspection. It could be an accident inspection or accident report checklist,” he continued.
“They can document anything that is wrong with a photo and comments, which are sent directly to the maintenance manager. Maintenance can work through a work order on our dashboard and move it from ‘in progress’ to ‘complete.'”
Replacing paper with software can result in an 86 percent reduction in time and about $1,000 per vehicle annually in inspection report costs, Colley said.
“It modernizes the fleet and allows them to run huge operations without a huge paper trail. It can support multiple locations with ease. If you are running five or six locations, it is extremely difficult for a paper-based business to know what is going on with their fleet at all times. And there is a low-cost monthly fee to access the software,” he said.
The company has an exclusive partnership with UMA. Through that, they offer members a 14-day free trial and a 10 percent discount for life plus complimentary setup and support. Prices range on the fleet size, though a typical UMA member would pay around $5 per vehicle per month, Colley said.
