November 12, 2024

Chris Rivera, COO at Canton Car Wash, explains how NoPileUps™ has been crucial to business at all sites and has helped improve tunnel management, increase throughput and revenue, stop in-tunnel collisions and more. 

Transcript

I'm Chris Rivera and I'm the Chief Operating Officer at the Canton Car Wash. We opened in 2009, so we've been in business for 15 years now.

We had heard about NoPileups™. To be honest, I was pretty skeptical. I wasn't very nice to the sales guy at the ICA show, which I feel badly about. So if he's out there, you were right, I was wrong.

So I kind of heard about benefits, cost savings, so we implemented it in one of our new locations, and we soon discovered that we really, really really, really liked it, so from there on, we've been using it every single location that we operate in.

Accidents don't happen on slow days, it's very unusual because there's not another car in the tunnel for a collision to happen. They almost always happen on a very busy day, and that's, as every operator knows, that's when you're making the most revenue. So when a collision happens, you have to shut everything down, you have to stop, you have to make sure the customer gets out of their vehicle safely. Not only are you losing revenue or money to a damage claim or having to deal with an upset customer, but you're also dealing with substantial downtime. So we love that NoPileups is catching those issues before and, you know, make sure the issues are resolved and safe and just continue operating.

So we're able to maximize revenue by getting an increased throughput, right,we're reducing our damage claims. I think we're providing a better customer service experience so those customers are are continuing to come back to us. Many instances, we're able to also load the vehicle without any loader, so that certainly is a huge savings as well.

Since we implemented NoPileups, we've seen the damage claims and the amount of the claims drop dramatically. We were probably spending anywhere from like 20 cents to 25 cents per vehicle. Now we average, you know, probably about 3 to 5 cents per vehicle.

Each week we get an NPU report emailed to us, so I love that part that we don't have to consciously go pull a report. It's really nice to have automated, it's right in front of each manager. The general manager can look through that report. I know some of them specifically will go through if they're noticing an unusually high number of stops. They might dig into it a little further to understand what they can do better, one to prevent those stops from happening but also just to get better throughput.

I'm actually surprised that more people don't use NoPileups. For a while, I almost wouldn't tell other operators because it was sort of like a, you know, a secret weapon. So when I talk to other operators and they tell me that they aren't using it, I feel like they're taking, they're somewhat taking a risk, and they also just don't know how much easier it can make their life. I know NoPileups recently reduced the monthly fee, too, so I mean, I would have kept it, but certainly I'm glad to have the additional savings. So to me it just doesn't even makes sense with the lower fee that you wouldn't use it.