Oxford Direct Services (ODS) says it is meeting its compliance agenda across an owned and grey fleet equating to almost 600 vehicles thanks to Licence Check’s Driver and Vehicle Information Solution (DAVIS) platform.

One of Oxfordshire’s biggest trade employers with a workforce of over 600 people, ODS provides managed services for the construction of housing, highways , buildings and maintenance of roads, parks and properties.

It operates a fleet of 330 vehicles – cars, light commercials and heavy goods vehicles – plus another 250 grey fleet cars and vans, with almost 900 registered drivers on its books - and switched to the DAVIS platform two years ago.

Driving compliance at the wholly owned company of Oxford City Council  falls under the remit of transport manager Chris Noonan, who said that the DAVIS solution had transformed the way that ODS was able to check the licences of its various classes of drivers with total accuracy, speed and clarity – whilst also providing simplicity of use.

“As the person responsible for fleet operations and licence checking, there is no way that I could manually check all the licences across our 895 registered drivers,” he said.

“DAVIS gives us the ability to manage all drivers through one compliance system, on a transparent basis, with highly visual management reporting, exception alerts and with excellent back-up and support from the team at Derby.”

To help management decision-making, the, dashboard-style reporting in DAVIS aims to show users results at a glance and highlights any exceptions, with alerts automatically flagging events such as drivers approaching 12 penalty-point limits, or photocard licences or business insurance expiring.

“This makes my job so much easier and allows me to see at glance where action is required,” said Noonan.

With such a large volume of licences, one of the key benefits of introducing DAVIS, he says, has been the speed of licence checking, thanks to the use of e-mandates for driver permissions and rapid response times from the DVLA. Drivers can now be added to the system and an initial licence check carried out within just 30 minutes.

“This has been a major improvement,” explained Noonan. “Now, no-one is allowed to drive any of our vehicles without first having had an in-vehicle assessment with me and also having an initial licence check.”

The e-approval process is Licence Check’s most popular and regularly used method of checking drivers’ licences to the system as it requires little intervention from the fleet or transport manager other than inputting the driver’s name and email address into DAVIS, says Licence Check.

To manage its grey fleet vehicles as effectively as possible, ODS uses the DAVIS grey fleet module which manages the compliance around employee-owned vehicles. This includes verifying vehicle registration, road tax and MOT and recording key requirements such as motor insurance policies, with the correct level of business use cover and reporting upcoming expirations.