“Fleet tracking also tackles driver behaviour such as speeding.

“Instead of a driver feeling pressured to get to the next job, and therefore being tempted to speed, they can have peace of mind that the tracking unit is providing accurate routing information and will show when delays occur or a job has taken longer.”

He added that monitoring speed can work both ways and come to a driver’s defence when accused of infringements.

“There have been legal cases where a ticket has been issued yet telematics data has proved a vehicle has not been speeding or parked illegally,” Mackie said.

“In the case of Indesit I think this trial proves that there are real tangible benefits to using telematics.”

The three suppliers in our trial were also keen to offer support where a fleet needs to tailor the type of data provided.

Andy Walters, managing director of Quartix, said: “I had a meeting with Indesit a couple of months ago to look at how we could better integrate the information generated from its own job recording/costing system and our tracking system.

“For me this appears to be the most relevant issue for Indesit – the tracking system will only deliver value if it can help it monitor and improve upon business capacity.

“Since that meeting Indesit generated some SQL queries to provide me with service call data – based on the start of service calls, the time recorded for each one and the time and post code.

“We were able to generate similar queries on our system – matching the locations and times, and then comparing the recorded job times etc.

"The correlation between the two was quite close and I am due to have a follow-up meeting.

“For the moment we received another batch of data for analysis and we also hope to look at how this process could be automated to help reduce administration time and look at ways of improving capacity.”

In the early stages, Indesit reported that extracting and collating the data could be a lengthy process although, according to the telematics suppliers there are ways of streamlining the procedures.

Doran said: “Collating and interpreting the data can be time-consuming depending on what a company is trying to achieve.

"By being focused on fleet utilisation, Indesit can create specific reporting systems that can be run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

"These reports are intuitive and can help create a more efficient fleet.”   

It would have been likely that further information and improvements to operation would have been possible over a longer period.

Mackie said over the medium term the analysis of data coming from the suite of standard reports starts to provide longer lasting benefits to the business as a whole, as it adjusts its working practices and processes based on this new information.

“This may come in the form of improved customer service through better knowledge of driver locations,” he said.