Telematics Case Study - Caterfoods

The increased focus on health and safety practices in the workplace – due to governmental regulations and legal requirements – has prompted many businesses to place duty of care considerations at the top of their agenda. 

Caterfood, a leading South West catering supplier, needed to increase the visibility over its fleet of temperature controlled vehicles, which cover thousands of miles each year. In order to monitor and manage its duty of care requirements, Caterfood needed easy-to-use reports that showed key indicators of driver safety, including driving times and speeding. Fleetstar gives Caterfood full visibility of not only driver performance, but also of vehicle maintenance schedules and licensing information – further enhancing and evidencing Caterfood's duty of care provision.

Client Profile:
Caterfood has supplied the catering industry for 40 years from its base in Paignton, Devon. It has a delivery area of over 6321 square miles – stretching from Cornwall to the borders of Wiltshire and Bath. The company delivers a specialist supply of ambient, chilled and frozen foods to the catering trade with over 2500 customers including Exeter University, Torbay Leisure Hotels and The Venus Group Cafés.

Caterfood first engaged with Cybit in 2005. It implemented Fleetstar-Online to improve the operational efficiency of its fleet and was able to cut vehicle idling by 50 per cent.

A few years on, Caterfood has expanded its fleet from 36 to 47 commercial vehicles and from three to 10 cars – all connected via the Fleetstar system. The combination of the growth in fleet size and new health and safety legislation meant Caterfood needed to do more to monitor and manage its fleet.

Duty of Care challenges:
James Hunt, Operations Director of Caterfood: “Since day one, Fleetstar has delivered a range of operational and bottom line benefits. However, as Caterfood operates in a highly demanding and dynamic environment – our supply chain turns around within 24 hours – where our drivers could potentially expose themselves to risk, we needed to increase our efforts to ensure that every employee adheres to our health and safety policies. To do that we needed a flexible system that was able to provide a comprehensive overview of driver safety.”

Fleetstar's real-time data reports had already helped Caterfood to cut driver speeding by 70 per cent. However, new regulations have prompted companies to evidence their health and safety compliance and Caterfood required a more granular level of insight and reporting on areas such as journey lengths, break times and driver speeds.

Cybit's Fleetstar Duty of Care Solution:
“The Duty of Care module has really enhanced our ability to monitor our fleet activity in more detail, as we are automatically updated with vital fleet information, including how long our service team spends driving and whether they are taking regular breaks. This enables us to not only evidence compliance with duty of care regulations, but to also ensure that our health and safety practices are adhered to across our fleet.”

The Fleetstar Duty of Care module is designed specifically to help manage obligations relating to the Working Time Directive, Corporate Manslaughter and Duty of Care legislation. It combines technology with accredited consultancy advice and training to provide audit trail evidence for the appropriate authorities.

Caterfood uses Fleetstar to monitor the condition of each vehicle in its fleet. The Duty of Care module provides Caterfood with up-to-date vehicle history, sending automatic reminders to the transport office, via SMS or email, when vehicles are due for a MOT or service.

“The automatic reminders ensure that our drivers are operating vehicles that have been serviced regularly in line with regulations – reducing the risks to our delivery staff whilst out on the road in our vehicles,” commented James Hunt.

“We now have complete visibility, manageability and evidence of the compliance of every vehicle in our fleet,” continued James Hunt. “We can combine the vehicle service and driver certification records held in the system with evidence of a series of other tests – such as eye-tests – to provide proof of our commitment to health and safety.”

Setting benchmarks for on-going improvement:
Due to the demanding nature of the catering industry, Caterfood needs to constantly monitor deliveries and ensure that its targets are being met. To support this, Fleetstar is helping Caterfood to set benchmarks and inform Key Performance Indicators around driver performance and vehicle fuel consumption.

“We are now using Fleetstar as an integral part of our performance management system. We have been able to set fuel reduction targets and by using the data collected via the Fleetstar system, can effectively monitor the fuel saving and the cost benefits associated with this,” commented James Hunt. “As with fuel saving, we can also monitor journey times, routes and vehicle productivity ensuring that our fleets are meeting targets.

“The increased visibility that Fleetstar provides gives us the flexibility we need as a dynamic and fast paced company to ensure that we can constantly deliver the highest level of service to our customers, but more importantly ensure that our employees are all as protected from risk as they can be,” James Hunt continued.

Looking ahead:
“We have just extended our contract with Cybit for another three years and look forward to our continued partnership. As temperature control is a key consideration for our fleet, we will look to enhance the way we monitor the temperature of our vehicles – ensuring that we can continually deliver optimised services to our customers.

“Future targets also include reducing our collective CO2 output. Fleetstar has already helped us to lay the foundation by reducing our fuel consumption. We have purchased 15 new “Eco Start System” vehicles and hope to expand on this strategy in the year to come,” concluded James Hunt.