Russell Marine

SpeedyDock provides a highly efficient "boat dispatch system" for Russell Marine, Alabama's largest marine dealer.

Russell Marine has four on-water marina locations which provide boat sales, service, and dry storage. At Russell Marine’s on-water locations, including their largest on-water location with over 700 dry storage customers, The Ridge Marina, SpeedyDock provides a solution to their growing need for a more efficient way to manage dry storage and dispatch boats for service and customer launch requests. This solution not only allows Russell Marine to provide better customer service to their dry storage customers, but lets them focus on accommodating new customers as they enter the showroom.

According to Jeff Ellis, manager at The Ridge Marina, SpeedyDock helps streamline processes, solve problems, and provides benefits including:

1. Cutting phone calls down by at least 85 percent.
2. Keeping customers informed of where their boat was launched to. Customers can pick their boat up at one of several docks and can see which one their boat was moved to through the app.
3. Record keeping of boat movements for knowing who handled the boat and at what time. This is useful in case there are questions about damages.
4. Record keeping of who requested a boat in case there are customer questions where they may need to talk to a family member.
5. Tracking the number of boats out. There may be over 100 boats back at the dock at once awaiting a return to storage. SpeedyDock gives a real-time view of how many boats are out and how many are ready to return to storage.
6. Allowing their service department to make launch requests for forklift operators when they need a boat for service. Customers get a notification when the boat is in service if they request it in the water while it is being worked on. Internally, this gives a full picture of every time a boat has been touched.
7. Tracking which boats have been summerized and winterized.

Jeff played a key role in finding SpeedyDock after identifying a need and reflecting on a similar solution he had used from his experience in the trucking industry.

“I have been the manager of this location for 19 years, but my previous background was construction materials supply which was more or less the trucking business. SpeedyDock was my answer to a “dispatch system” where we could track every truck we had and follow it through a delivery process. SpeedyDock has helped us in many ways without hiring the first additional person,” said Jeff. “SpeedyDock has been a tremendously effective tool for us,” he says.

Russell Marine continues to grow their dry stack storage business at all of their marina locations and has played a key role in guiding the continued improvement of SpeedyDock in order to fit their processes and bring on new ideas.