Increased efficiency and lower costs for C&S Motor Group

Major efficiency gains along with reduced costs are being experienced by London’s leading vehicle recovery company, C&S Motor Group, since adopting the ACTIVE vehicle tracking and communication solution from TomTom WORK and integrating it with their existing system.

Incident response and vehicle recovery times are faster, leading to more effective utilisation of their 60-strong vehicle fleet. Running costs of the new system are also more than 80% lower than before, amounting to an annual saving of £35,000. And the TomTom WORK equipment is proving to be highly reliable with no failures compared to the former system where 25% of the units were out of commission at any one time.

C&S Motor Group provides recovery services across Greater London and is able to recover vehicles of every type and weight. It handles over 50,000 call-outs a year through its control room in Edmonton, North London. Customers include motoring organisations, insurers, emergency services, local authorities, Transport for London, franchised dealers and commercial vehicle fleet operators.

The company chose the ACTIVE solution from TomTom WORK following a thorough market evaluation. It combines the LINK black box to track the location of each vehicle and the GO unit that includes a touch-screen two-way messaging capability with satellite navigation. These devices communicate in real-time through WEBFLEET in the control room.

The user-friendly nature of the API’s in WEBFLEET made it relatively easy to integrate the system, according to managing director Andre Cox. Jobs received through Turbo Dispatch are entered into the Garage Manager system and routed directly into WEBFLEET through a simple plug-in link that C&S Motors developed themselves.

Recovery crews also found it easy and safe to use – particularly because of the touch-screen capability – and control room staff found that information flows between them, the crews and customers were faster and more reliable.

“We know when a vehicle is heading towards a job and what its exact arrival time will be,” says Andre Cox. “Through touch screen technology used in the GO unit, we know when it’s on the scene and when it leaves, whether it’s recovering the vehicle to another destination and when it will get there, or if it’s free for the next job. The result is a massive increase in our efficiency with much better utilisation of our skilled crews and valuable equipment.

“More important is that customer satisfaction levels are on the up because we can manage customer expectations and react faster to a job as a result of having real-time information at the push of a button. This is helping to give us a real competitive edge based on ever improving response times.

“Navigation by clear voice instruction and easy-to-read maps is a major benefit for our crews. It means that they can get to incidents by the most direct route, saving time and fuel and in a safer, less stressful way with the added bonus of live traffic information to help them steer clear of hold-ups.

“The system was also very cost-effective both in terms of the initial purchase price and ongoing running costs. And we can use it to produce a wide range of useful management reports from checking on driver’s hours to speeding tickets or parking fines.”