What is the biggest issue with your scrap yard that is causing you to lose sleep at night? Could it be the loss of revenue? The inefficiencies and huge amounts of manual administrative tasks? What about possible theft from internal and external sources?
Whatever is keeping you from peaceful sleep, we’re certain that a good scrap metal recycling management software can help.
Scrap metal recycling management software (we know, it’s a mouth full) is a solution that helps scrap yard owners and operators to improve many aspects of the business, like:
Customer Management
Reporting and Data Analysis
Order Processing and Payment
Inventory Management
Automation
Let’s jump into each of these items for a deeper understanding of how they can improve your scrap yard operations!
Customer Management
A great scrap metal recycling software keeps track of all customers and allows your business to maintain relationships as well as feed information into specific reports. Some features you should look for in your scrap metal recycling software are:
Management of each customer’s identification information and automatic reporting to local government entities like Leads Online or Texas DPS.
Management of each customer’s transactions over time
Ability to reach out to previous customers via text for promotional reasons
Feeding all customer information into reports for audience segmentation
Reporting and Data Analysis
You really should not consider a software solution that does not include reporting and data analysis features. By taking data gathered across the many functions of your business, you can get a better idea of the health of your operation. Also, if you have multiple scrap yards it is imperative that all scrap yards are operating on the same system to aggregate all data into one location.
Your scrap metal recycling software should include a dashboard that displays:
Daily/Monthly/Yearly transaction report
Number of new customers and their origin (Text Coupon, Coupon from Ad, or Referral from a friend, etc)
Inventory of each metal type on hand
Sales to processing plants
Metal commodity prices on your dashboard for profit and loss estimates
Order Processing and Payment
In addition to tracking the details of each transaction, the software should have some automations built in that make transacting payments a breeze. Some must have features are:
Automatically create tickets by using a License Plate Reader (LPR)
Provide safe and effective payment options that reduce payment errors (like prepaid debit cards)
Automatically send details of all transactions to local government offices
Attachment of photos and videos of the metal purchased
Text receipts to customers
Inventory Management
Knowing what inventory you have on hand and the quantities of each is vital to the health of your scrap yard. Knowing what you have across multiple scrap yards is a must. Without a product that effectively tracks all of your incoming and outgoing transactions, you won’t be able to run an efficient business. Finding a software solution that automatically tracks your entire inventory is a non-negotiable as you’ll be able to:
See what inventory you have at a single (or multiple) scrap yard(s)
Understand the value of your entire inventory
Send shipments to processing plants quickly
Automation
In addition to the features mentioned above, there are new technologies being released that allow for even more automation. Some of these features include:
Monitoring your scrap yard operations in real time from anywhere in the world
Texting coupons and pricing information to your customers
Getting instant supervisor authorization of a real time price change
Uploading all purchases to state authorities daily,
Reading all weights from your scale indicators automatically
Merging tickets for commercial customers,
Alerting commercial accounts when loads arrive at your scrap yard,
And more!
Metal to Money is leading the way with many of these new automation technologies. We would love to show you more of what we’ve built in a demo - set up your demo with our team today!
How to Select the Right Solution
To improve the operations of your scrap yard(s) this year, ensure that you’re picking the absolute best product for your needs. To make sure you’re partnering with the right company, you should:
Set up a Demo
Ask if the product is web-based or local
Ask if the product is SaaS (meaning it is a monthly subscription) or annually purchased
Ask about the technical support offerings
Ask about the startup costs
Ask about the associated fees
Ask about the hardware required to run the program
Ask about the training for the program
Ask about the cancellation policy
Ask about the conversion from your current solution (or to another solution)
By doing these things, you can rest easy knowing that you have done your due diligence in selecting the absolute best solution for your specific needs.
Learn how Metal to Money’s M2M Cloud can provide all of the features listed above and more by scheduling a demo today!