Truck rental and contract hire firm Prohire has saved more than 12,000 sheets of paper in the six months since introducing R2C Online's i2i SMR system.

Operations Manager Mick Steele explained: “How we managed fleet maintenance compliance was a manually intensive process. Inspection sheets and supplier invoices were physically printed and processed for compliance checking and approval. We recognised that r2c Online, as a specialist solution provider to the commercial vehicle market, offered the potential to digitise and automate these processes, which would result in significant efficiency improvements for our customers, suppliers and our business.”

Steele continued: “We have greatly reduced the need to print, approve and process invoices manually and overall we are completing at least twice as many authorisations per day.”

R2C Online is currently used by over 10,000 fleets and repairers throughout the UK.

‘Issue 2 Invoice’ is a web-based SMR booking, pricing, authorisation and e-invoicing platform. After just 6 months the platform is processing more than £1 million of monthly maintenance spend, a figure which is growing exponentially every month.

“Efficiency was the main driver for us and we have already seen significant, and importantly, measurable gains for everyone. Everything is just quicker now: service inspection paperwork is automated, authorisation is electronic and easier to manage and we can divert more focus on customer service orientated tasks with the time savings we have realised. At the end of the process we receive pre-reconciled invoices, massively reducing queries and telephone calls for both customers, supplier and ourselves.”

Steele added: “Because inspection sheets, invoices and work authorisations are now processed digitally we have saved over 12,000 sheets of paper so far”.

Nick Walls, managing director of r2c Online added: “The whole premise of i2i is to provide fleets and repairers of commercial vehicles and other asset classes with an electronic method of pricing, authorising and invoicing SMR. This dramatically streamlines processes for both repairers and fleets and massively reduces queries requiring manual intervention. We have already seen great uptake of the i2i solution and with efficiency opportunities such as those Prohire has experienced, we are expecting interest levels to accelerate even higher. It is great to see Prohire enjoying these benefits within their operation.”