The Company
WGM Engineering Group is one of Scotland’s leading engineering solutions providers. The company offers a complete turnkey solution for mechanical and electrical and civil engineering. Established in 1986, WGM has developed a reputation for outstanding client service, a high quality of work and a passionate commitment to health and safety. The company offers a countrywide service from three linked service centres based in Glasgow and Livingston. The business operates primarily in the water and waste water sectors, but also in the petrochemical, power and process industries as well as having a number of food and beverage clients.
WGM employs around 180 staff and operates a fleet of 90 vans.
The Challenge
WGM was facing issues with its previous telematics provider, which was providing poor quality and often inaccurate information. With engineers on call 24/7/365, often travelling to remote areas to carry out repairs and maintenance in poor weather conditions, the company was looking for a product that would enable them to monitor a number of areas, including arrival time on site, fuel consumption, carbon footprint and driver behaviour. With ambitious growth plans, the company was seeking a solution that not only provided timely and accurate data but was sufficiently flexible to adapt as the fleet increased in the next three to five years.
The Solution
According to Head of HR Yvonne Thompson, WGM chose Webfleet because it ticked so many boxes.
WGM Engineers work in a very fast moving environment, operating in a reactive situation. They can be working on issues as simple as a pump repair or a major asset at a wastewater treatment plant. The vans cover on average 28,000 miles a week, often working in remote locations.
Introduced as an improvement tool, the installation of LINK and EcoPlus brought immediate benefits. The Webfleet fleet management platform provided the ability to monitor a wide range of KPIs, including speeding incidents, idling, arrival and departure times on site and real time planning.
We began to see results immediately, said Yvonne Thompson. Drivers quickly realised the benefits for them, as well as for the company, in making use of the OptiDrive facility, which monitors driver behaviour recording incidents such as speeding, harsh braking and idling.
Many of the jobs are undertaken in variable weather conditions with the engineers using their vans to warm up whilst on site. Increased knowledge of fuel consumption and a company-wide initiative to reduce carbon consumption meant that idling time reduced from 11 minutes per day to eight minutes per day.
Over a 12 month period the average OptiDrive scores went from 6.1 to 6.7. Fuel cost savings of 22% were achieved and fuel consumption improved from 33.8mpg to 36mpg, while speeding incidents were reduced from 1% of driving time to 0.1% of driving time.
We also used the figures in the charts to explain the measures to wider groups of people, explained Yvonne Thompson. For example, we are now able to show both existing and prospective customers that we can track the exact arrival times on site and the length of stay. Such transparency is a powerful tool in reinforcing our commitment to customer service and also demonstrates transparency.
Webfleet also integrates seamlessly with Fleetcheck, which WGM uses for vehicle maintenance, enabling mileage for each vehicle to be updated on Fleetcheck to monitor service and maintenance, this reducing the duplication of information.
The responsive nature of the business means that the ability to route plan in real time is a major bonus for the engineering team’s job planners. Sometimes planning changes hour by hour and the ability to check where a particular engineer is located at a specific time has really helped to streamline our planning process and improve accuracy on arrival times, said Yvonne Thompson.
As a management information tool, the ease of use of the analytics and the ability to drill down and compare one vehicle trip to another, really helps us to define what is going on. It provides factual information from an HR perspective, too. The support we had from the reseller during the sales and implementation was superb. The whole experience with Webfleet has been absolutely brilliant for us!
