How to turn your truck into a full-blown warehouse

Did you know your van could become a full-scale storage facility – the one with reduced inventory carrying costs and more potential to meet the demand faster than your competition does? This blog post will help you tap into this heavily overlooked opportunity without scratching your head even once.

Why would you want to use a truck as a warehouse?

If you’re in field service work and have a fleet of trucks going about repair/installation jobs it only makes sense to treat them as warehouses – four-wheel warehouses if you will. With this view in mind, trucks have to be stocked up regularly to make sure your field teams have all the necessary parts and materials at hand at all times. Having to make extra trips to the warehouse and back to get a part you are missing on the job site (because you didn’t realize you were out of it) only takes away from your field workers and, overall, your business.

Another good reason to use a vehicle as a warehouse is how easily you can outperform your competitors by showing unmatched delivery speed. Consider how much time it normally takes you to take an order, figure out which warehouse is in a better position (geographically and product availability wise) to fulfill it, and how long it is before it’s picked up by your delivery team. The driver or the salesperson manning the truck could act on an incoming order without delay - process it, check availability, sell and deliver while on the road.

Truck inventory management with the help of a mobile app

Having quite a lot of inventory on the move comes with questions like how to stay on top of what’s on hand and what needs replenishing and at what truck. Kurt Casas, the owner of K.C. Body Shop Supply, Inc., figured that out over 10 years ago. What they did was find a software system that would let them assign their wholesale delivery trucks loaded with body shop products to digital inventory sites in the app, track inventory levels, sell right off the trucks, and send that data over to their QuickBooks in the office. By the way, the name of the system was and still is (as K.C. Body Shop Supply never stopped using it) HandiFox.

HandiFox Desktop and HandiFox Online have mobile counterparts that extend and give you a renewed sense of control over inventory, purchasing, and sales processes outside of the office. Here is how your field team can use the mobile app on the road:

• Create and receive against purchase orders
• Audit truck inventory via barcode-enabled counting
• Transfer products across your fleet of trucks
• Input orders and manage customer profiles
• Pick and Pack
• Create and print invoices
• Add service hours to invoices
• Capture customer’s signature
• Record payments
• Print transactions
• Sync back to QuickBooks

What’s the gain again?

There’s no arguing that, unlike brick-and-mortar warehouses, keeping inventory in trucks entails fewer carrying costs. There are also a lot of operational benefits to consider:

• The possibility of a same-day delivery
•  More sales opportunities or fewer missed ones
• A mobile app introduces a paperless approach to inventory control
• All the parts of the business stay in connection
• Live capture of parts usage or sold inventory
• Streamlined procurement, meaning there’s less money sitting in inventory

If this has piqued your interest, it could help to take a free trial of HandiFox and see if this would work for your business as well as it did for Kurt Casas and other HandiFox users with truck inventory management needs.