B&K Boiler Services has grown steady over the years and the system set in place to manage the engineers was becoming unwieldy - when each engineer had completed a job, they had to phone the office to check-in before moving on to the next job. “As each engineer can complete up to 10 jobs every day, that’s a lot of calls to answer in a week,” said Mr Worthington, B&K Boiler Services Owner. “The sheer volume of calls meant we had to consider hiring an additional admin person.”
The company also received calls from customers asking for a precise time of when the engineer would arrive to their property. Since the company didn’t know the exact location of each van on the road, the office administrators were unable to accurately predict the time at which the engineer would arrive and scheduling in emergency jobs was complicated. As a result, Mr Worthington thought that the standard of service his company was providing was weakening. A manager at a nearby company suggested he install a fleet management system and, on recommendation, Mr Worthington chose the GPS Fleet Tracking solution from FleetMatics
Since fitting the FleetMatics GPS fleet tracking system, Mr Worthington has noticed that scheduling of jobs has become more efficient, and that he can better manage his engineers. “Previously, the average number of jobs completed by an engineer was between 8 to 9 jobs a day, it’s now 9-10 – the FleetMatics GPS system has paid for itself 10 times over,” says Mr Worthington. “Also, if we get an emergency job in, we can locate the nearest engineer and assign the job accordingly and the beauty is we can tell the customer precisely when we will be there.” The ‘Live Fleet’ tool monitors where all the vehicles are in real-time, indicating whether an engineer is en route to the next job or, if they are still on a job, the office staff can work out how long it will take to complete before moving onto the next one.
A further benefit to the company is the reduction in fuel bills, even though the cost of fuel is continuously on the rise, achieved through a tighter restriction on using company vehicles for personal use. With the FleetMatics ‘Daily Report’ function, B&K is able to see whether a van has been used out of hours or varied from its normal route. “Since installing the FleetMatics GPS tracker 3 years ago, our yearly van mileage has almost halved – dropping down from 28000 to 15000 miles – that’s a huge reduction in fuel costs to my company,” says Mr Worthington
A change of attitude amongst the staff hasn’t gone unnoticed to Mr Worthington either. Due to the monitoring of vehicles, the engineers have become more punctual and relationships within the company have improved. Mr Worthington explains: “We don’t have to keep phoning up and disturbing our engineers during a job to find out where they are and, by using the Live Traffic alerts, we can advise them when to use an alternative route to avoid traffic jams. Furthermore, we have set up service alerts for each vehicle – by performing regular maintenance on the fleet each van is more reliable and more fuel efficient.”
One unexpected additional advantage of installing the system is that B&K can easily cross-check time sheets. “One of my engineers was at a customer for two hours the other day but accidentally wrote down one hour,” recalls Mr Worthington. “Conversely, we can also back our engineers if a customer disputes a bill.”
The benefits that B&K has received since installing the FleetMatics GPS Fleet Monitoring tool have far exceeded the expectations of the company. Mr Worthington is convinced that the system achieves the right balance for the company in terms of the monthly investment and the productivity improvements and fuel cost savings that it now makes. “In a climate where every business is struggling to cut costs - this is one overhead I can justify.”
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FleetMatics is a leading global provider of fleet management solutions delivered as software-as-
The company’s world headquarters are in Ireland, with UK offices in Reading and Glasgow and U.S. headquarters in the Boston area. FleetMatics is the parent company of SageQuest.
For more information, please call 0118 9131476 or visit: www.fleetmatics.co.uk
