Driving standards improved immediately and we achieved cost savings of 25% in the first two months.

The Company

Sanctuary Maintenance is part of Sanctuary Group, a leading provider of housing and care homes across the UK. The Group manages around 94,000 units of accommodation, including more than 60 care homes.

All maintenance on the Group’s housing stock is carried out through Sanctuary Maintenance, which has teams of fully qualified plumbers, electricians, gas engineers, gardeners, cleaners and general operatives. Sanctuary Maintenance operates a 24/7 365 days a year Customer Service Centre, based in Hull, which handles all customer calls and is responsible for the allocation of jobs to the maintenance teams operating in six regions throughout the UK.

Sanctuary has an in-house fleet comprising 600 light commercial vehicles. Fleet performance is critical to Sanctuary Maintenance’s objective of providing a quick and efficient response to customers’ requirements.

The Challenge

A core aim is to provide a top quality service for the customers of Sanctuary Maintenance clients. As part of an established programme to invest in service levels and customer experience, Sanctuary Maintenance’s next step was to look at the performance of the fleet.

Fuel and maintenance costs were an additional consideration, as higher fuel prices resulted in the fuel spend escalating.

With this in mind, a decision was made to consider tracking vehicles as a means of driving down costs and improving service and Sanctuary Maintenance entered into a relationship with a Webfleet reseller.

The Solution

This focused on two regions and involved 80 vans. LINK was installed and within two months savings of 25% had been achieved on fuel costs, with other benefits quickly identified.

Driving standards improved immediately. In particular, our drivers’ speed awareness increased almost overnight, said Managing Director Dennis Evans. The ability to monitor driving standards encouraged drivers to adopt more considered driving styles and also enabled the vehicle’s whereabouts to be monitored at all times.

Based on the results from the pilot scheme, Sanctuary Maintenance introduced the Webfleet solution to the rest of the fleet early in 2013 to maximise effective fleet management. To ensure clear communication to the drivers, the fleet management team toured the UK with a roadshow to explain the benefits both to the business and to drivers as well as clarifying any misunderstandings.

LINK and PRO navigation units were installed in each vehicle, to determine optimum routing for each job as well as ecoPLUS for accurate MPG and fuel management. ecoPLUS proved to be a key feature in changing driver behaviour as managers were able to use the Optidrive tool to monitor and score driver performance, whilst drivers themselves received direct feedback on their behaviour via Active Driver Feedback on their navigation device.

Webfleet gives real time insight into fleet operations. This is presented in a dashboard format with KPIs that can be customised according to individual requirements. Bespoke reports using historical information can also be tailored via a state of the art reporting suite and accessed according to user rights in an information hierarchy.

The Customer Service Centre (CSC) at Hull, responsible for allocation of jobs, has seen dramatic improvements in customer service. Webfleet enables us to pinpoint the location of an operative in real time. We know when an operative arrived at a resident’s premises, enabling more accurate recording of response times to jobs, said Dennis Evans. The Webfleet products have already made a major impact on our business. We achieved cost savings of 25% in the first two months and our drivers’ behaviour has clearly improved. We are also very happy that our partnership approach to supply chain management was readily accepted by our Webfleet reseller with excellent results, added Dennis Evans.