“Improved route planning or the ability to share arrival times or proof of service statistics.

“Managing driver behaviour and journey types should lead to a reduction in fuel costs and consequently lower carbon emissions while vehicle and servicing data should help plan fleet maintenance and reduce down time for vehicles and their drivers.

Any telematics solution will also reduce the administrative burden of complying with any ‘duty-of-care’ requirements with regard to providing a safe working environment for on the road employees by supplying an analysis of time spent travelling.”

With genuine and tangible benefits already discovered by Indesit during this short trial period, other companies with similar operations would be expected to find similar gains.

Walters said: “I believe that this kind of use of location-based information – in linking tracking into the company’s other business systems – is of great importance to large companies like Indesit and should form an important next step in the useof telematics.”

Fleets take control of their vehicles

Fleet News organised a trial with a fleet of field service engineers for household appliances.

For two months, 15 of Indesit’s field service engineers at three regional depots have been using telematics systems to look at how significant a difference it can make to the way the vehicles are operated.

Quartix has supplied telematics systems to vehicles operating from Indesit’s Peterborough depot, Road Angel provided units for vehicles in Northampton, while vans based at the Leicester depot were fitted with Tracker telematics systems.

Each of the telematics suppliers systems have broadly similar

functions and are fitted to short-wheelbase diesel Ford Transit 260 models.

Information gained from the trial showed that, despite using route planning software widely available on the market, it had underestimated the average speed of the vehicles, meaning the amount of time built into the engineers’ days for travelling was too short.

An average speed of 32mph was predicted, but the actual average speed has been 27mph, resulting in about three-and-a-half hours spent travelling each day – more than the two-and-three-quarter hours predicted by the routing software.

This has already resulted in valuable information on which to base a review before implementing a new call handling system in 2011.