ERS Canada

Save Time & Money With E.R.S. Canada

By Alvis Violo Emergency Road Services Of Canada Inc. In these very difficult economic times, finding ways to control costs can make or break a trucking company. It is not very often you come across a company that can truly save your company money. Emergency Road Services Of Canada 1

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Inc. (E.R.S. Canada) was founded on the principle that when they receive a service call from a customer, their number one goal is to save that customer time and money. Although breakdowns are the most unwelcome part of the trucking business, you now have someone to call who can help you control your breakdown costs across Canada.

Canadian Trucking Magazine

In September of 2006, the owners of E.R.S. Canada, Alvis and Dawn Violo, realized that no one in Canada provided coast to coast 24 hour emergency breakdown services for the trucking industry. It did not seem right to the Violo’s that trucking companies did not have a reliable source to call for help 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Two years later, E.R.S. Canada has become Canada’s leading emergency road service provider.

During those first two years, E.R.S. Canada has already gone through three expansions and is currently located in a brand new office building in Mississauga, Ontario. They have put together a state-of –the-art contact center with bilingual (French and English) Emergency Service Representatives who are dedicated to providing the fastest and most cost effective emergency road services 24 hours a day.

The concept behind E.R.S. Canada is simple. In the event of a breakdown, customers only have to make one call, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to a toll free number, 1877-377-2262, and E.R.S. Canada does all the rest. Their network of service providers includes mobile truck/trailer repair companies, tire repair companies, towing companies and reefer/heater repair comCanadian Trucking Magazine

panies. They also handle lock-outs, battery boosts and fuel delivery.

Customers pay a small coordination fee only when they breakdown which is between $38.00 and $48.00 per incident. There are no membership fees and E.R.S. Canada does not mark up the service provider’s invoices.

You’re probably wondering how a company who charges a coordination fee to help you find someone to get your equipment back on the road can actually save you money. That is a very good question which has some very interesting answers.

The first thing you have to do in order to understand how E.R.S. Canada can save your company money is to not think like an accountant. Accountants look at an invoice and see a coordination fee of $38.00 and argue that it cost you an extra $38.00 for the service call.

What the accountant fails to see is the cost savings that a company has achieved by calling E.R.S. Canada because those cost savings do not appear on the invoice.

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One of the cost savings you will never see on an invoice is the cost savings achieved by reducing your equipment downtime. In an average of one hour, E.R.S. Canada will have a service provider on site and your equipment will be back on the road in an average of less than two hours. As trucking companies

agree that equipment downtime costs on average of $50.00 per hour, every hour that E.R.S. Canada saves you in down time is money in your pocket. If E.R.S. Canada reduces your equipment downtime by an average of one hour per service call, the cost savings to your company will more than cover the coordination fee.

Another cost savings that will never appear on an invoice is the reduction in administration down3

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time your company achieves by using E.R.S. Canada. Instead of having to drop whatever you are doing when a breakdown occurs in order to find a service provider, you can now make one call to E.R.S. Canada for any type of breakdown, and they will do all the work for you. You can then go back to doing what you are supposed to be doing, like dispatching or running your business. The reality is that if you do the service call yourself, it will probably cost you more in administration costs (i.e. wages, benefits, overhead and long distance charges) than if you would have called E.R.S. Canada to do it for you.

If you factor into the service call, the lost productivity of the individual doing the service call, the costs of doing it yourself surely add up to more than E.R.S. Canada’s coordination fee.

Customers also save money by controlling their overall service call costs. By obtaining rates from all of their service providers, excessive charges are virtually eliminated by E.R.S. Canada. Customers take advantage of pre-determined rates and volume discounts granted to E.R.S. Canada by their service providers. Imagine never having to give out your credit card number again to a stranger in the middle of the night only to be taken advantCanadian Trucking Magazine

age of. If the true cost of the service call is $200.00, E.R.S. Canada will make sure it is $200.00 and not $400.00. Just in case a service provider does try to overcharge, Alvis Violo, through his experience as the owner of a truck and trailer repair facility, audits all service providers’ invoices to ensure accuracy and obtains credits if warranted. Alvis says, “Most of the time the service provider admits to making a mistake on his invoice and issues a credit.

They want our business and they want to resolve the issue as quickly as possible”.

As the old saying goes, “It’s not what you see, but what you don’t see that counts”. In the case of emergency breakdowns, this couldn’t be truer. Not only does E.R.S. Canada do all the work for you, which reduces your administration downtime, they also get you equipment back on the road as quickly as possible, which reduces your equipment downtime.

Throw in the fact that E.R.S. Canada gets you the best possible price at the time of the service call, and your company also controls their overall service call costs.

The main reason that E.R.S. Canada has been able to achieve great results is the fact that they have put together Canada’s most up-todate and accurate service provider network. In almost two years, their service provider network has grown to over 7,000 vendors and continues to grow on a daily basis. By having at their finger tips all of the vendors’ Canadian Trucking Magazine

rates, hours of operation and in many cases, personal cell numbers, E.R.S. Canada is able to quickly find the best service provider to get the job done. Dawn Violo says “Our providers love doing work for us because we pay them fast and we treat them with respect”. All that E.R.S. Canada wants in return is good service at a fair price.

The good thing about E.R.S. Canada is that you do not have to call them for all of your emergency

service calls if you don’t want to. You always have control over who you want to call only now you have a back-up plan for times when you are too busy, short staffed or just don’t have a service provider you know in a certain part of the country. Lloyd Rawlings, the Fleet Maintenance Manager for Vitran Express says, “They are the perfect back-up system for Vitran”. Boysie Dindyal, the Manager of Contact Relations for FedEx Freight Canada says, “One call gets the wheels rolling. Their response time and superb follow-up is an indispensible part of their service.”

Other notable customers include Day & Ross, Maritime-Ontario, Kingsway Cabano, Bruce R Smith, December 2008

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TST Truckload Express, TST Overland Express and CN Rail.

What E.R.S. Canada would like to become is a key part of your “emergency road services solutions team”. You can be sure that they will work hard for you and get you the best price at the same time. You can’t go wrong when their mission statement is, “To provide the fastest, most cost effective emergency road services in order to reduce our customer’s equipment downtime and administrative downtime”. Thanks Dawn and Alvis for helping trucking companies save time and money in these difficult economic times.

You just may be that little edge that companies need to stay afloat this year.

E.R.S. Canada would like to invite all potential customers and service providers to call 1866-693-7724 or visit www.ersofcanada.com in order to obtain more information. Use the online forms to instantly relay your information to them and remember, becoming a customer or vendor is absolutely free.

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