Plant hire company Garic slashes fuel costs by more than £50k with TomTom Telematics

Garic has revealed annual fuel savings of more than £50,000 by monitoring driver behaviour across its 45-strong sales and delivery fleet.

Following the introduction of TomTom Telematics’ WEBFLEET fleet management solution to underpin a performance improvement programme, the plant hire company has seen mpg efficiency soar across its mixed fleet of HGVs, vans and cars.

Garic’s delivery drivers receive a weekly bonus if they hit agreed performance targets for fuel consumption.

WEBFLEET was essential for us to introduce the bonus scheme as it gave us the tools to monitor performance and to demonstrate the optimum mpg our drivers could achieve, said Garic logistics manager Phil Hibbert.

HGV idling time has dropped dramatically since we introduced the scheme with drivers now thinking about the fuel consumption figures much more and changing their driving styles accordingly to achieve the weekly fuel bonus.

The OptiDrive indicator in WEBFLEET combines fuel efficiency information with speeding, idling, harsh steering and braking data, to score and profile every driver. Employees are empowered to correct poor driving style on the move through real-time feedback on driving style via their in-vehicle driver terminal.

In addition to the substantial fuel savings, our hire desk team are using WEBFLEET to provide customers with accurate, real time, ETAs, added Hibbert.

We’re now planning to fully integrate WEBFLEET with our hire software system and upgrade to TomTom’s seven-inch PRO 8275 driver terminal so we can capture customer signatures on delivery.

Giles Margerison, director at TomTom Telematics, commented: With greener and safer driving a key priority for fleet managers, our focus has continued on equipping them with the tools to continually improve driver behaviour. The recently launched OptiDrive 360 reporting tool offers a fully integrated approach, allowing fleet operators and drivers to learn, coach, compare and evaluate driver behaviour more accurately than ever before.