S & M Contractors are a Civil Engineering & Groundworks company. The business was formed 21 year ago and is run by two directors. Sam Hughes-Rowlands has been in the business for the last 4.5 years as S & M’s vehicle co-ordinator. S & M work on a range of projects covering all aspects of groundworks.
Our Brief
With the fleet now extended to 26 vehicles and with a goal to provide smarter operational efficiencies to benefit both customers, drivers and operational staff, Sam started looking into the features and benefits of a vehicle tracking solution.
Sam had list of key objectives she wanted the solution to deliver:
- To ensure that the team were on the right site at the right times
- To have the ability to monitor driver behaviour whilst drivers are in company vehicles
- The accounts department needed information as to when team members are working which would support payroll administration
- Geofencing to ensure the correct vehicles are in the correct places at the right time
- Alerts to show vehicle movements outside of working hours
- Reports on running hours
Our Solution
We deployed our Foretrack Connect solution to meet Sam’s requirements. GPS Tracking units were installed into each individual vehicle which can now be managed by Sam and her team using the customer portal.
Due to the precise objectives Sam had, we were able to configure specific reports and alerts to help her manage the fleet and gain greater insight into driver activity.
All Sam’s vehicles need to be onsite overnight for insurance purposes, so we set up the business premises as a mandatory zone for the overnight period. Sam also had a set of other best practices that she wanted to be able to adhere to in order to provide a better service and run the vehicles more cost-effectively. These included:
- Specific city areas defined as prohibited zones on weekdays between 4pm and 7pm to avoid inefficient driving during rush hour in the busier zones
- To check drivers stay on the job route and do not go home during their lunch break the driver’s home address is set as prohibited zone between 10am and 4pm.
- To ensure that vehicles working on remote customer jobs the customer address can be set as mandatory location for the specified duration of the working day.
- It is necessary to prevent unauthorised use of vehicles at the weekend, so the system can be configured to set the areas where vehicles are kept as a mandatory zone between 7pm Friday and 7am Monday.
Result
Sam now has a 360-degree view of her fleet with instant alerts and reporting set up to tell her exactly where all her vehicles are at any one time.
Sam told us: “I’m so pleased with the tracking solution. It was set up really quickly and Foresolutions went out of their way to make sure I had all my custom reporting set up to fulfil our obligations to our insurers and also to make our whole operation run more smoothly. We can now pass on the savings we are making through smarter journey management to our customers. I’m also able to get more proactivity from the rest of the team where we’ve reduced the amount of time spent on admin. Payroll errors are pretty much non-existent now so we have happy employees and a more efficient business overall.”
“We’re so happy to hear of Sam’s positive experience. We strive hard to meet our customers’ requirements and also give them something extra. The Foretrack product was perfect for S & M Contractors, the out of the box SaaS model being an ideal approach. Important to note is that even though this is a ready-made solution, we are still able to customise it for specific needs, such as Sam’s alerts on certain locations and bespoke reporting she needs. It’s a great example of where ‘out of the box’ and ‘built for you’ can combine.” Tom Ross, Foresolutions
