Telematics can obviously bring a lot of benefits to the individual, to an entire enterprise and to insurers, but if you’re a fleet manager and you make meaningful changes to your company’s vehicles, you can also receive accreditation from the likes of the Fleer Operator Recognition Scheme (FORS). That’s what’s happened in the case of luxury bathroom provider, Crosswater, which managed to improve the fuel efficiency of its vehicles by an impressive 20 per cent by taking on Tom Tom telematics for its vehicles and it’s now been accredited by the organisation.
The FORS group, which is part of Transport for London, is designed to help encourage businesses (through its semi-promotional and validating accreditation) to improve their vehicle efficiency and safety. Telematics have understandably been a big boon to this aim, with FORS really beginning to deal out a lot more praise thanks to its implementation with different fleets.
In the case of Crosswater, it’s been using TomTom’s popular WebFleet tools to keep track of its vehicles, sending the closest one to a new job and cutting back on speeding, sharp acceleration and braking, which has all ultimately led to the overall improvement in fuel economy, reduction in tyre and engine wear and improved the service to customers by cutting back on vehicle downtime.
“We deal with over 850 jobs per day and without a telematics system in place, we were spending a lot of money on what we now know are preventable fuel costs,” said Brett Westbrook, transport manager at Crosswater Holdings (via FleetNews).
“In terms of training, monitoring driver behaviour has made a huge difference. The Optidrive reports and dashboards available in TomTom Webfleetare all invaluable when it comes to promoting fuel efficiency and safer, greener driving.”
As part of the TomTom telematics package, Crosswater also made use of its driver profiling tool, known as Optidrive, which can separate drivers out into different categories, highlighting those that might need more training, and suggesting ones which are the most reliable and safe drivers, who in turn might be due for some measure of promotion or commendation. TomTom has been keen to point out as part of this news, that this feature allows fleet managers to go quite deep into the data to discover trends in driver habits and to really break down where the business needs improvement. Often, it can lead to big changes in the way drivers operate.
“There is an increased onus on businesses to reduce the environmental impact of their vehicle fleets and Crosswater has put itself at the front of the pack by implementing a programme to improve driver behaviour,” said Giles Margerison, director UK & Ireland, TomTom Telematics.
“Improved green credentials can be married with cost savings and greater efficiency simply by using the available data to generate smarter insights into fleet activity.”
With companies like Crosswater showing so many benefits from their new telematics system, it’s no wonder that a few weeks ago we heard that TomTom was now tracking over 400,000 vehicles on a day to day basis, making it one of the world’s largest telematics providers. This is with a total of 30,000 customers, which suggests its base is much more than just fleet managers. It also provides telematics solutions for individuals and for insurers, which can then pass the technology on to their customers.
