Alamo Cement Company Stays Paper-Free and Safe with Teletrac's HOS Solution

Alamo, a leading supplier to the construction industry in the San Antonio, Texas area, operates approximately 200 large rigs driven by owner‐operators. These haulers deliver more than three million tons annually across Texas, ranging from aggregate and sand to slag and coal and petcoke, plus some countless amount of sacks of Alamo Cement and Quikcrete. The company was launched in 1880. While honoring its long history based in central Texas, Alamo pioneered the use of advanced telematics and, in particular, hours of service (HOS) e‐logging. The company is now one of the most experienced of its kind in applying these technologies to improve safety.

Highway safety is a driving force behind virtually everything Alamo does in transport, from its careful selection of high quality owner‐operators to requiring that every truck be Teletrac‐equipped. It’s one of the most important ways Alamo partners with its Alamo Transit owner‐operators to deliver outstanding service with a long term view of safety’s bottom‐ line benefits. This approach demonstrates that relationships, regulatory compliance and profitability can go hand in hand.

Alamo Transit / Alamo Cement are owned by Buzzi Unicem, an Italian company with a global presence in the cement industry. Raul Tamez, vice president of traffic, runs his operation like a fine sportscar: precise and efficient. One key is operating a safe fleet with Alamo Transit owner‐operators who practice safe driving behavior. Safety‐related cost savings go straight to the bottom line. These savings include fuel efficiency, vehicle maintenance, repair costs and insurance premiums, plus avoiding direct and indirect costs of crashes. Indirect costs include schedule disruptions, and customer relations eroded by missed deliveries to construction projects operating on their own tight schedules.

Full regulatory compliance also generates cost savings. By using Fleet Director for electronic hours-of-service (HOS) logging, Alamo eliminates paperwork associated with manual logs. “We had to verify and keep paper logs for about 200 Alamo Transit owner-operators on file for six months,” Tamez says. “Now all the data is in Teletrac’s system, available to us 24/7 from any browser.” Driver and vehicle data are captured automatically in Alamo’s HOS e-logs and integrated with Fleet Director’s GPS vehicle tracking and date/time stamps, so there’s no need to verify logs. The e-logs are inherently accurate. And Alamo is automatically CSA 2010 compliant with EOBR (electronic onboard recorder) requirements.

Some fleet managers worry about Alamo Transit owner-operators accepting monitoring and e-logging. But once Alamo transit owneroperators understand how Fleet Director makes their lives easier, they never want to go back to the old way. One driver recalls, “When they first put Teletrac on the trucks, I thought it was going to be a bad deal. Now I love it. Saves a lot of time, a lot of hassle. You don’t have to keep logbooks or anything. No paperwork! In the morning, punch in your number, you are ready to go. Punch out at night, that’s it. Mileage and everything, it tells you at the end of the day. You don’t have to sit there figuring out your log: ‘This is not working, that is not right.’ And you can go back and see all the days, all the weeks, whatever you have done.”

Another Alamo Transit owner-operator says, “It keeps us from having to explain a lot of things. There were a lot of people [in their cars on the road] who would pick up a cell phone and say, ‘We have a driver here that’s weaving all over the road,’ or ‘driving too fast.’ Now all the dispatcher has to do is a hit a couple of buttons and know exactly whether [the caller] is telling the truth—or not.”

For owner-operators, protection against mistaken complaints isn’t the only benefit. Alamo places a sign on the driver-side door of every rig, announcing that e-logging is in force and the vehicle is being monitored by Teletrac. “As soon as they see that, a driver says, “DPS doesn’t even mess with us. They know we’re running legal, because there’s no way around it. You can’t beat it.”

Tamez adds, “It has been a great help when our driver pulls up to a checkpoint or DPS trooper stop. They can see we are electronically logging. Sometimes they will move us around in front of a lot of other trucks. It reduces the waiting time for that driver”—and helps Alamo maintain on-time deliveries and efficient operations.

When Tamez first evaluated telematics service providers, he says, “We wanted to purchase from an industry leader, a company that was already selling to leaders in the transportation sector. When I visited with Teletrac, I asked as to who were some of their major customers. The name Ryder came up. And that made a big impression on me. It’s one of the reasons we went with Teletrac and Fleet Director.” Alamo’s long list of criteria also included a system that was simple to operate, offered near‐100% uptime, reduced paperwork and updated frequently. It had to be a system that law enforcement agencies recognized and respected, enabled easy training for dispatchers and Alamo Transit owner‐ operators. Further, Alamo sought to strengthen security by being able to quickly recover stolen tractors, and to gain competitive advantage by improving customer service.

Teletrac and Fleet Director met all the requirements and continues to do so. Says Tamez, “We have been very, very pleased with our decision.”