Jonathon Scott is an Estate Services Operations Manager and has worked for Catalyst Housing for many years, in fact since 2004.
Catalyst is a proud member of the G15 group and is one of the UK’s leading housing providers in London and the Home Counties, managing over 34,000 homes. Their purpose is to provide homes people love for all their customers, regardless of tenure type, and so to create communities and neighbourhoods that can flourish and grow.
As a not-for-profit organisation they reinvest money raised from property sales into developing and maintaining more affordable homes and are set to build 1,300 new homes a year from 2022. Catalyst has an excellent track record in successfully delivering award winning major development projects and are proud to receive external recognition for the quality, creative design and their commitment to creating homes people love.
They are a 2020 Sunday Times top 100 Best Company to work for and invest a lot of time and resources into their people, because they know it is their people who will drive their success. Jonathan states:
”Our values are embedded across the business. We work hard to deliver outstanding customer service and to be a high-performance business.”
Our Brief
As a housing association with an Estate Fleet of approximately 100 vehicles it was clear that implementing a GPS Tracking system would help the business operate more efficiently.
Manging this busy team with both small & large vans would mean that having visibility of all vehicles, in one place, would be an invaluable management tool.
The system would also need to deliver on many features that would support the operational management such as driver behaviour reporting, geofencing & a reduction in fuel costs to name a few.
Catalyst has a large number of operatives in the team managing daily movements of their engineers’ movements between jobs and multiple sites. Having the ability to deploy the next available engineer to the next job at the touch of a button would increase their overall efficiency.
The Management team have a duty of care to their drivers when they are on the road, so implementing a system that can monitor driver behaviour would support this.
Catalyst also had an objective to minimise risk within the fleet through safer practices which, in turn, would result in lower insurance premiums. An extra added benefit is brand protection, as all vans are sign written and instantly recognisable, so vitally important that the drivers uphold the company values and image through exemplary driving and consideration.
Our Solution
We have installed GPS Tracking devices managed by our Foretrack Connect SaaS platform into the fleet of Estate Services vehicles. Overall, this has improved the operational efficiency of the team of around 30 users who rely on the information they have at hand daily to support the management of the jobs and tasks required. It is fair to say the GPS System is an integral part of their operations and they would be lost without the system.
Catalyst have now been a tracking customer of Foresolutions for over 5 years now, and in those years we’ve been working closely with Jonathan to provide access to the very latest technological developments on our Foretrack Connect platform. Our team of developers are always working on new features to the system that enable greater customisation to reporting, alerts and management tools.
Having a system that can be accessed via desktop or mobile by all relevant users as required means they can monitor the fleet operatives as and when required, often outside of working hours.
Catalyst takes advantage of the full reporting suite. Reports which are set to automatically send on a daily, weekly, monthly basis which can be tailored per individual user enables them to effectively monitor driver behaviour, including harsh braking and cornering and high speeds along with monitoring fuel usage.
- Groups have been set up within the system which determines which division they vehicle belongs to. This gives management & operatives the information they need.
- By having location information on all of the vehicles it has streamlined job allocation by knowing which driver is geographically closet to the next job this reduces both time wasting & fuel costs.
- All drivers within the team, management and operational staff have a vehicle allocated to them, they do not change between drivers.
Catalyst also has five mowers which are also tracked from a security perspective. The mowers should not be away from the locations on the vans which move them to site, so if for any reason the mowers are in a different place than the vans then they know they have an issue!
The Outcome
Catalyst is very happy with the system and sees the value and long-term ROI across many areas of the business as a result of their investment with Foresolutions. The system is now an integral part of their daily operations.
A key part of our offering is consistent quality customer services support. This means that Catalyst always receives a prompt response, tailored system reporting and features plus assistance with investigating any incidents that may have occurred.
Overall, the impact of the Foretrack Connect asset tracking system has been very positive. Catalyst is very pleased with the outcome of lowered costs and increased operational efficiencies. We look forward to many more years of supporting Catalyst with their business needs.
