Southern Accent Sod is a family-owned company in Warner Robins, GA supplying locally grown turfgrass varieties to customers throughout the greater Atlanta market. The business works with about seven sod farms and a local trucking company to deliver fresh, quality grass.
In June 2021, Beth Strickland, owner of Southern Accent Sod decided to implement Turf Logistics™, a software platform to help streamline business operations throughout the entire sod harvesting process until it is delivered to a customer. Strickland explained several sod farms they work with had complimented how much they liked using Turf Logistics. Prior to Turf Logistics, Southern Accent Sod used QuickBooks for accounting.
“I’d adjusted it (QuickBooks) so that we could also run our scheduling and trucking off of it, but it wasn’t working well for pallet count and trucking communication. We were still having to type everything into an email or text every day. We were duplicating all of our work and we knew we had to find something that would do a better job,” she shared. “And we looked at a lot of things like software for landscapers and nurseries but we couldn’t find anything that did everything that Turf Logistics does for us.”
Strickland said Turf Logistics streamlined ordering and trucking logistics for their business, which was a big necessity for their daily operations. “We were at a point where we’d done just about everything we could with Quickbooks and we weren’t going to be able to grow if we couldn’t scale up, and we needed software to do it.”
Southern Accent Sod uses the full version of Turf Logistics. Strickland said although they aren’t a sod farm, they use the harvesting portion of the app to communicate with their truck drivers when sod is harvested at one of their farms to share where they need to pick it up.
“Communication is all in one place and we let our trucking company have access to the trucking part of the app to see what they need to move,” she added.
Strickland likes that drivers can use the Turf Logistics Drivers App to mark when an order has been picked up and delivered. “There have been times where a driver has taken a photo of where the order was dropped off and it has been really helpful. If we have a customer call us saying the order is not there, instead of picking up the phone to call the trucker, I can see it was delivered and if there is a picture I can tell the customer where they can find their grass,” Strickland said. “I can say hey you need to walk to the end of your driveway and find your grass, it’s not on the front porch. It’s been helpful.”
“It coordinates everything in one place. We can look at it on our phones, we can use it on several different computers and it’s very accessible. Our business is very mobile and Turf Logistics is mobile with us,” Strickland said.
She encourages any sod broker looking for an efficient and consolidated system with minimal paperwork or printed invoices to try Turf Logistics. With minimal training sessions, Strickland said their team was brought up to speed on how to use it and they’ve used the support option when they’ve run into questions. “I normally get a message back pretty quickly. The onboarding was really easy and we onboarded about four of us in just a few sessions.”
Strickland’s final comments were that she’s very impressed with the fact Southern Accent Sod has never had an outage in service while using Turf Logistics. “That’s saying something because I am a software developer and implementer myself so the up-time is valuable,” she said.
For more information about Turf Logistics, click here.
