Alliance Dairy Service and LiveViewGPS Keep Dairy Farmers from Crying over Spilt Milk

The problem

Hot milk.

To the average person it means a soothing drink before bedtime to ensure a good night’s sleep.

To a dairy farmer, hot milk is a nightmare.

Once a cow is milked, the raw milk is refrigerated until a tanker truck collects it. If something happens to the refrigeration unit—an electrical outage, a generator malfunction—the stored milk can rise above a safe temperature where bacteria begins to grow. If the milk becomes contaminated, it can disrupt the entire supply chain. That’s why tanker truckers are instructed to refuse milk that isn’t properly cooled.

The result: The dairy farmer has no alternative but to dump the milk and suffer the financial loss.

At the first hint of refrigeration problems, dairy farmers immediately call companies like Alliance Dairy Service in Caldwell, Idaho to come out and make emergency repairs.

Alliance Dairy Service services about 100 dairies from Boise, Idaho to eastern Oregon. Their fleet consists of nine vehicles: six service trucks and three sales vehicles. Trained technicians drive the self-contained service trucks on daily rounds to perform routine maintenance. However, when an emergency call comes in, Alliance Dairy Service responds quickly.

“It’s not just hot milk that triggers an emergency call,” explains Ty Wilfong, Alliance Dairy Service’s office manager. “A broken milking machine is also a big problem. Cows like to be milked, usually twice a day. If a milking machine breaks and the cow isn’t milked, the animal suffers, and you end up with a stressed cow.

“In the past when emergency calls came in, we didn’t always know where our service trucks were. It was a confused situation with lots of telephoning back and forth between us and our drivers trying to determine who was closest to the emergency. It was frustrating because prolonged delays could prove costly for our customers.”

The LiveViewGPS solution

One obvious solution to eliminate confusion was to install a GPS system that could instantly locate all of the company’s service vehicles.

“We recognized a GPS tracking system would improve our efficiency and our customer service,” Wilfong states. “The question was, which one?

“One of our owner’s relatives recommended we call LiveViewGPS. We checked them out and called. The solution they offered us was perfect for our needs, so we installed Live Trac G-5 vehicle trackers on all our vehicles.”

Next-generation Live Trac G-5 vehicle trackers deliver real-time 10 second tracking. The small unit includes a highly sensitive GPS receiver that works where other GPS vehicle tracking systems fail. It includes a 10-day battery backup and is easier to use than a cellphone.

Live Trac G-5 units operate on LiveViewGPS’s exclusive Live Trac Platform that delivers real-time, 100% web-based GPS tracking that’s assessable from any browser or web-enabled mobile device. No software is required. The Live Trac system automatically issues alerts (e.g., when a vehicle goes outside a designated area, or speeds) and generates reports that provide detailed snapshots of drivers and vehicles in the field. Reports include start/stop, vapor trail, route alerts, mileage, aggressive driving, excessive idling and more. No monthly contract is required.

The benefits

“The immediate benefit of our GPS system, of course, is the ability to go online and get a bird’s-eye view of exactly where all our vehicles are in real time,” Wilfong notes. “This allows us to make instant decisions regarding which truck can respond the quickest to an emergency or which will be dispatched to take care of other problems. Believe me, dairy farmers appreciate such efforts.

The Live Trac GPS system aids Alliance Dairy Service in optimizing their routes and determining which places they’ll go to that day—an important consideration since vehicles can travel up to 4 hours from one end of their territory to the other.

“We also use our GPS system as a training device,” Wilfong explains. “When I get a vapor trail report, I can show drivers the exact routes they used and suggest better ones. Often they nod their heads and say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ As a result we save time, and we save on our fuel bills.”

The drivers themselves have become more disciplined since the Live Trac G-5 vehicle trackers were installed on their vehicles. They don’t speed or drive recklessly, which helps lower insurance costs. And they’re better informed when comes time for routine maintenance.

“I can’t believe what a difference LiveViewGPS has made in our operations,” Wilfong concludes. “I love it. I absolutely love it. We’re more productive, and we’ve lowered vehicle operating costs. Best of all, the dairy farmers greatly appreciate our ability to respond quickly to emergencies so they don’t have to literally pour their profits down the drain.”