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Cheshire housing association improves service with GPS

Posted by Gary Flood on Thu, 11/03/2010 - 11:20
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A Cheshire housing association, Cheshire Peaks & Plains, has turned to GPS vehicle tracking to improve the way contractors like builders and electricians servicing its properties schedule their jobs.

The system, Fleetstar-Online from telematics specialist called Cybit, helps managers track its mobile workforce in real-time, allowing better monitoring of their daily activities and also reducing unnecessary business mileage through the efficient allocation of skilled contractors and teams.

 
“We need to get the best use of our suppliers and also make sure we have the resources to offer a full 24 hour service to our users,” Nigel Johnson, operations manager at the Association, told PublicTechnology.net.
 
Cheshire Peaks & Plains is managing 5,000 properties in the Macclesfield and Knutsford region as part of a four-year, £43million investment in housing and services upgrades. It is also committed to transparency with, for example, key performance indicators being published on the association's website, which ranks its ability to complete emergency repairs and planned jobs against stated targets and for which visibility of repair teams is crucial.
 
The movie was also prompted by customer feedback, added Johnson. “We complete regular satisfaction studies from our customer services group. These highlighted two areas where we needed to make improvements: our ability to get to appointments on time and our first-time fix rates. We identified vehicle tracking technology as being able to assist us with both of these.”
 
Fleetstar-Online is a GPS based device located inside the vehicle that provides real-time positioning information transmitted via O2's GPRS network to Cybit's servers. This data is processed into a broad spectrum of user defined and configurable reports, providing real-time fleet visualisation or historical analysis. The system can be accessed from any web-connected PC.
 
“Our next step will be to look to further optimise workloads and schedules,” added Johnson. “Using this system we've found some drivers are doing 100 miles a day so wasting two to three hours of their time, so we need to allocate jobs batter based on current location.”