About Chancey Metals
Chancey Metals manufactures steel stairs, balcony rails, canopy, and fencing for multi-family apartments. David Perez, the Logistics Manager, is responsible for getting building materials from their facility to the job site on time to ensure the finished products (e.g. stairs) are installed on schedule and the overall construction schedule stays on track.
The Challenge
David needs to make sure deliveries are on time, else Chancey Metals is held financially liable because the apartment units are not safe to occupy and can’t be rented out until Chancey finishes installation. David also needs to make decisions around whether to use Chancey’s internal fleet or outsource loads to a broker.
Before Portex, David used email and phone calls to correspond with various freight partners independently. He didn’t get the quick responses he was looking for, meaning he often had to scramble at the last minute to make a decision on how to get his freight to the job site on time.
With the old process, David had to track multiple communication threads, while constantly answering the same questions and clarifying details of the shipment to different brokers. On average, he would spend 4 hours per day on coordinating logistics to make sure deliveries were on time.
“In the manufacturing industry, there are a lot of materials that are very time critical. You need to be able to break down your freight needs in a way that is easy to understand—by material, by size, by weight, by delivery window—and Portex helps you do that so your freight partner knows exactly what is needed.”
The Solution & Impact
Portex is a gamechanger for David, who has leveraged the platform's automations and tools to go from spending 4 hours a day on procuring and coordinating freight to just 20 minutes, saving him 3 hours and 40 minutes per day.
Once David started using Portex, emails and phone calls were quickly replaced. Now he has one easily accessible, centralized place to request quotes, choose competitive pricing and communicate with brokers directly. With the nearly 4 hours of extra time per day, David has begun to focus on strategic tasks such as root-causing production issues and optimizing freight cost across the internal fleet and 3rd party freight partners.
“Portex allows me to do a lot more things, which enables me to
meet my KPI’s. I now have the time to proactively solve issues while making sure material is delivered on time. The goal is to take care
of the customers because they take care of you, and Portex helps us do just that.”
David uses Portex reports to easily review which carriers are the most reliable. For the carriers that don’t meet his standards, it’s a single button press to make sure they are not included on future quotes.
Having solved Chancey’s main challenge of on-time shipments, David now has the opportunity to be more strategic about cost savings. Because Portex makes it easy to communicate with and onboard new brokers, David has been able to save his company money by driving more competitive pricing through the platform—much to the delight of Chancey Metals management.
David can be as detailed or as high level when requesting quotes. If he just needs an estimate, he can quickly get that through Portex. He loves how information like locations and stop notes are saved and auto-populate as he starts typing. If he has a live load, he can be more detailed, even building out multi-stops, which was a feature that wasn’t available on other systems he used.
David’s favorite part about Portex is how easy it is to use. When another facility needed to start procuring freight, it took him just 15 minutes to onboard and teach his coworkers how to use the platform.
“If you want to save time and be more efficient, go with Portex all day long. Best system I’ve ever used and the most user-friendly.”
