The Pivot Technology Resources company is an outgrowth of its founder’s long experience in trucking from the IT side of things, says that founder, Cory Hunt. His experience dates back to the mid-1990s, when he installed then Qualcomm satellite equipment for TMC in Des Moines, Iowa, “troubleshooting, installing, uninstalling,” he says. It all “got me interested in the mobile communication systems” themselves, after which he hopped around that portion of the industry, working for a variety of mobile-communications providers before, in 2008, establishing Pivot.
“I know how the on-board units work,” he says, from “wiring, loading and unloading software” and more. When a couple companies who were oversold equipment by a provider he’d been working for asked him just where to go with the extra stock, the idea for Pivot was born. “This is happening all over the country,” Hunt says. There’s “equipment coming out of trucks but that still has a useful life – good working equipment. Trucking companies have so many other problems to deal with than how to sell these other mobile communications systems.” Figuring out how to facilitate others’ investment in the used equipment was the mission from the beginning.
“What happens now is we can offer high-quality equipment for about half the price and still have a warranty, still perform maintenance on them,” Hunt says. Purchasing fleets and owner-operators “partner with us as an ongoing resource — the core value is being able to supply them with good equipment and being an outlet for the equipment they don’t need or want – or if they’re just going out of business.”
Today, Hunt says, the company has relationships with some all-owner-operator fleets who’ve moved to electronic logs to provide a lower-cost option for buying the units. Hardware manufactured by Omnitracs and PeopleNet for such purposes is among the resale equipment they offer, he adds.
In addition to being an authorized reseller of used units, Pivot is also a distributor for some new systems, including those made by the company Hunt calls its go-to for many smaller operations, Rand McNally. Visit the company website to see the variety of units they work with. There’s more to come in that area, too, he adds.
Warranties and other repairs to any piece of equipment bearing the Pivot Technology Resources marking are facilitated by the company directly, whether through over-the-air troubleshooting or broader service. “Our processes have been refined over the years. We have it down to a science,” Hunt says. “I feel like our repair process is a little better than some of the service providers.” Rather than bear the cost of shipping the unit out for repair under warranty, he adds, “if you have a bad component, you call us — if it’s in our system as one of ours, we can send another component out overnight with an airbill on us to cover the shipping cost.”
As for the likelihood of used units satisfying the ELD mandate’s compliance specs once the mandate is in place, Hunt notes software updates from the service provider are most likely to cover that concern on any Pivot-sold equipment, of a piece with what most providers have been saying about their existing hardware. Automatic On-Board Recording Device (AOBRD)-spec units — more or less all engine-connected electronic logs in use today — put in service prior to the mandate have an additional two years, besides, beyond FMCSA’s December 18, 2017, compliance date before the ELD spec must be utilized.