“Without Axon, we would have been looking at hiring two or three more people. We love it. I couldn’t imagine going back.”

Providing excellent customer service is #1 for family-owned Villa Park Trucking in California. With Axon’s highly customizable reporting and invoicing tools, they can provide real-time updates to their clients (sometimes up to six times a day!).

Director of Operations, Cole Hathcock, explains how Axon has streamlined their workﬂow, brought them actionable insights, and paid for itself along the way.

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I’m Cole Hathcock with Villa Park Trucking. We’re based out of central and southern California, and we haul predominantly agricultural products.

We’re a third-generation trucking company. My grandfather started it while he was a ﬁeldman for a packing house in southern California. He grew up in ag, and he would go out and talk with farmers and growers, convincing them to bring their fruit back to a certain packing house.

He saw a need for dependable trucking to pick up loads out of the ﬁeld, so he bought a truck, then two, then four, and now we’re at 90. That’s how we got our start hauling citrus out of the ﬁeld to the packing house.

We started using Axon in 2018. It’s been awesome, honestly.

We had tried a few diﬀerent TMS, but we were doing it from scratch on a piece of paper, napkins, yellow pads, and spreadsheets. We decided that we really needed to make a change into something that would grow with us, and that’s when we found Axon.

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How do you compare Axon support to other software you’ve dealt with?

With the other companies we’ve had, the support was not ideal. It would take a while. You would send an email or make a phone call and wouldn’t hear back for a day or so, and by the time that happens you’re on to the next thing.

With Axon, I can write a quick note or make a phone call, and when they get back to me, that problem is still fresh enough to where I can actually address it. Typically, you get a phone call within 30 minutes to an hour.

I have not had an instance where somebody hasn’t been able to answer a problem or a question that I’ve had.

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How has Axon helped you manage the company?

One of the biggest things is having oversight over our company. It gives me a lot of data and details to search out that make an impact in our business. I can track how many loads a driver is doing, what that driver is getting paid, and what I’m billing on that truck.

I can run several different reports to individualize and focus on what the trucks, trailers, and drivers are doing. I can also run a bigger report to see what my dispatch has done. I’m able to utilize those reports to make decisions within the business and to curtail any issues I’m seeing. It just helps me manage without having to be in constant communication with every single person in my business.

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Has your staﬃng changed as your ﬂeet grew?

When we got Axon, we were at about 60 trucks, and we’ve seen that grow out to 100, settling in at about 85 to 90. From an admin perspective, we grew our fleet by 50% and we’ve had to add one person. Without Axon, we would have been looking at hiring two or three more people.

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Does Axon help you get your invoices out quicker and more accurately?

From the speed in which we’re able to generate invoices, it’s been awesome. One of the nice things about Axon is that we can actually manipulate what it is that we want on invoices and reports. We custom generate reports for customers straight from Axon so they can get updates however they need them.

With our big customers, we’ll actually sit down with them, and they’ll tell us what they want to see, and we’ll make out their invoices as such. As a result, the invoicing has been much better, and our customers love the way we’re able to invoice now.

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Do you use the equipment revenue report?

I do. I can see on every piece of equipment what the revenue was for that piece. It has benefited me in making investment decisions on equipment within the company.

I have equipment needs in three or four different divisions, and I only have a set amount of dollars to spend. In our board meetings, we go through the numbers generated by Axon to see where we will benefit the most from buying certain trailers.

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How has Axon’s cloud hosting helped your remote locations?

We added a second company and took our hosting from our own server to cloud-based. Before, everything had to be accessed through our server, and any time it went down, my remote guys were just done for the day and back on a pad of paper or a spreadsheet.

Now that it’s cloud-based, all of my remote guys can utilize Axon. As long as they’ve got internet access, they can get back to dispatching and put in real-time information. That way, I can run reports at the end of the day to see what we actually did, instead of having someone compile it the next day and always being a day behind. It’s been a huge help for us.

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Do you think the software has paid for itself?

Of course it’s paid for itself. The way that we are able to manage and monitor our business now, I couldn’t imagine going back to what we had done before. Without Axon, it would be a lot harder to manage our company as we sit today.

If someone asked me about Axon, I’d tell them it’s a great TMS software. We enjoy it. We love it. It makes billing very easy, helps us with our dispatch, the customer reports are great, and our customers respond really well to it.

All in One Isometric

THE ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION FOR SMARTER TRUCKING

Why juggle separate systems? Axon integrates your trucking operations with real-time accounting to streamline your workflow and get you paid faster.

By unifying your dispatch and accounting, you can eliminate double-entry and accelerate your billing cycle.

Enter data once – Axon handles the rest.

Streamlined Driver Pay: Cut payroll time in half as driver pay is recorded automatically when you enter your trucking transactions.

Eﬀortless Cost Tracking: Automatically match fuel and expenses to specific carriers, owner operators, or equipment.

Live Inventory Control: Purchases update your inventory and accounts payable in real time.

Automated Receivables: Prevent lost or unbilled orders and tickets by automatically updating accounts receivable as soon as transactions are ready.

Optimized Maintenance: Integrated work orders ensure parts are ready, equipment is serviced, and billing is accurate.

Axon Software will upgrade your business and give back your time.