Petroassist fuels progression with telematics

Petroassist is a petrol station forecourt specialist contractor with more than 50 years’ experience in the oil industry. The leading service provider supplies, installs and maintains a broad range of forecourt equipment, including fuel pumps, payment and control solutions, tank gauges and other ancillary equipment. The business has more than 50 multi-skilled field service engineers on the road every day across the country, with an agile fleet that mainly consists of vans and support cars.

The Challenge

Petroassist’s customer base is diverse and widely spread across the country, from city centre forecourts to rural petrol stations. Keeping track of where its field service engineers are based each day is paramount in ensuring it can service customers efficiently and dispatch jobs to the right colleague.

Prior to working with Teletrac Navman, the business was using another telematics system, but it required drivers to manually turn it on each time they operated a vehicle, which was often subject to human error. The on-road behaviour of its engineers was also up for scrutiny, as fuel, maintenance, and insurance premium costs had begun to rise.

Petroassist needed a telematics system that would operate on a key-in key-out basis, and provide a sophisticated reporting function that could give insight into the performance of each colleague on the road.

The Solution

It was important for Petroassist to find a supplier that not only had the right system for its particular requirements, but one that properly engaged with the business to fully understood the problems that needed addressing, enabling it to provide true consultancy.

After time spent with the business, Teletrac Navman recommended a mixture of its Qube 300 telematics hardware, and market leading DIRECTOR platform, which is an advanced fleet tracking system that enables fleet managers to have access to real-time data in one easy-to-use interface. DIRECTOR provides fleet managers with a diverse range of information – from the location of individual vehicles, to monitoring fuel usage and driver performance. The system can also help to significantly cut fuel and insurance costs.

One additional element recommended by Teletrac Navman was the inclusion of a Business/Private button on the hardware, so that drivers could indicate if and when vehicles were being used out of hours in order to supress the system from monitoring driver behaviour in the vehicles during those periods.

Qube 300 Navman

The Results

Since taking Teletrac Navman’s expert recommendation, Petroassist has seen major changes in its qualitative and quantitative business measurements.

  • Fuel consumption is down by 10%
  • Poor driving ‘events’ as logged by DIRECTOR have reduced by 43% per week
  • ‘At fault’ insurance claims have reduce by more than 50% year-on-year
  • Job dispatch times have improved with better fleet visibility, which has enhanced customer feedback
  • There has been a reduced requirement for vehicle maintenance

Murray Shepherd, Parts & Logistics Manager at Petroassist UK, said: “Not only is Teletrac Navman’s system the perfect solution for our business and easy to navigate, the personal touch of its customer services team, from job scoping, to implementation and ongoing support and training, has been the most refreshing part of our relationship. We now feel fully equipped to use DIRECTOR in the best way for our business.

“The workforce has responded so well to our Managing Director’s challenge to improve driving standards and be more efficient with our fleet operations, that our fuel card supplier contacted us to ask whether something had happened within business! This was due to us using drastically less than the amount of fuel we had budgeted for with them – our margins are now looking much healthier as a result.”

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