East Midlands-based Prestige Fleet Servicing (Prestige) has added a number of new features, including a service authorisation capability by mobile phone, to its Unity operating system to benefit both service centres and fleet customers.

Successfully piloted by Prestige’s field-based mobile servicing operators over a six month period, Prestige is now planning to roll out mobile phone authorisation to all service centres by the end of the year.

The Unity system is at the hub of the Prestige operation which provides servicing, maintenance and repair (SMR) work for leasing companies, fleet management providers, corporate fleets and aftermarket warranty companies through a national network of almost 400 service centres.

The Unity system now handles around 85,000 SMR authorisations a year, at a rate of more than 7,000 a month, and has seen a 35% year-on-year increase in volume as Prestige’s portfolio of corporate clients has continued to increase.

All service centres within the Prestige network use the end-to-end Unity system as part of their standard agreement for diary management, SMR authorisations, work progress management, electronic invoicing and management information reporting.

The latest enhancement will allow service centre technicians to receive work authorisations direct to their mobile phones without having to access the main system, it says.

They will also be able to upload images and videos of work that requires authorisation and receive acknowledgement and approval in return, thus helping improve efficiency levels and speed up job times.

Prestige is also introducing a new series of system rules for Unity that will increase the number of automatic authorisations for standard servicing work and MOTs. This streamlining of the authorisation process, to the extent that only exceptional items will require manual authorisation going forward, will also offer improved efficiencies for service centres as well as speeding up job times, it says.

Another development Prestige have launched is the integration of Unity with the Driver Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) database, which it says will allow fleet customers to verify that their vehicles have a valid MoT, as well as checking the vehicle’s MOT background to show any previous failures or prior advisory notifications which were carried out outside the Prestige network.

Operations director Nick Hutton, said: “The latest enhancements to our Unity system have the capacity to deliver real benefits to both our service centres and our fleet customers.

“The new mobile phone facility provides the capability to speed up the SMR process from authorisation to completion, while the new system rules upscale the number of automatic SMR authorisations through Unity and speed up job authorisation times.”

One of Prestige’s key objectives this year is to grow its service centre network to 400 outlets by the year end, and the company is well on the way to achieving its objective with more than 370 centres currently.

Prestige has added 76 new outlets so far in 2017 in new areas such as London, Manchester and Leeds, plus several new areas in Scotland and across many other parts of the UK.

As a result, job volumes have continued to increase. During 2017, Prestige has received 15,000 more SMR jobs compared to the same period in 2016.

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