In order to keep up with growing customer demand an independent regional vending company has turned to FleetMatics to help better manage its fleet.

Bettavend has been supplying refreshment systems and ancillary services in the Hampshire area for over 20 years, during which time the fleet has grown to 28 vehicles.

Operations manager, Ben West, said that, before fitting the FleetMatics GPS monitoring solution, the company was unable to identify an engineer’s location thus causing a time delay from one job to another.

“Our aim as a company is to offer a fast, efficient and friendly customer-focused service,” says West. “Due to a lack of information on driver’s location on the road, we were unable to schedule work accurately for them and, as a result, we were weakening the standard of service we aim to provide.”

The GPS fleet tracking system has allowed Bettavend to improve scheduling of jobs and better manage its service engineers.

A further benefit to the company is the reduction of fuel bills; even though the cost of fuel is continuously on the rise, this has been achieved through the reduction in vehicle idling time.

“Unthinking drivers can often spend time in their vehicle with the engine idling,” explained West, “which is incredibly fuel inefficient.”

The FleetMatics system records idling time and can, if required, send alerts when pre-set idling parameters are breached. With this information Bettavend has educated its workforce to think more about their idling time and this awareness has resulted in a large fuel saving.

FleetMatics ‘Live Fleet’ shows dispatchers the exact location of each individual vehicle, as well as reporting how long the engineer was at a particular job and the time it took to go from one job to another.

Knowing where a driver is at all times has made it easier for managers at Bettavend to assign unscheduled jobs to engineers more effectively, as they can quickly locate the nearest vehicles to that specific job and assign the job accordingly.

FleetMatics ‘Daily report’ is another tool used by Bettavend; this report is analysed against the daily plan for each driver to see what tasks were planned and which were completed.

A huge benefit for West is that the daily reports are sent directly to his iPhone, so he’s able to investigate any unusual events immediately, wherever he is. “The iPhone App is a really great function to have,” he said. ”It means that even when I’m on the move, I still have access to all of the fleet information.”

A change of attitude amongst the staff hasn’t gone unnoticed in the company either. Due to the monitoring of vehicles the drivers have become more punctual and relationships within the company have improved.

West explained: “There have been a few occasions when a customer has claimed that an engineer hadn’t turned up to a job; with GPS tracking we were able to quickly react and prove to the customer that in fact an engineer did show up, meaning we were able to back up our driver.”

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