N.E. Wholesale
Aeromark’s vehicle tracking helps N.E. Wholesale stay on the road in today's tough business conditions
Background
N.E. Wholesale a trade distributor of tyres and exhausts continues to extend its successful deployment of Aeromark’s Aerotrack vehicle tracking solution, which delivers visibility of N.E Wholesale’s 100 plus delivery vehicles improving its customer service and crucially, in today’s harsh economic climate, reducing operating costs.
N.E. Wholesale, part of North Eastern Tyre and Exhausts,
headquartered in Middlesbrough with eight depots across North East England, is a well established customer of the innovative mobile technology company,
Aeromark, which supplies Optimatics™, a solution that delivers the next level of telematics.
With five distribution warehouses throughout the North of England nobody reaches their customers faster and more regularly than N.E. Wholesale. Our service offering is at the forefront of our proposition and we are very proud to be the first choice for thousands of equity outlets, franchise dealers and independent tyre dealers.
Solution & Benefits
“Without a tracking solution we were ‘totally blind’ as to the whereabouts of our delivery vehicles. We were unable to accurately monitor the accountability of our drivers, for example, actual time spent travelling to and from deliveries and the associated fuel usage, time spent at a delivery, the amount of overtime being carried out and private use of the vehicles. This lack of visibility made it difficult for us to monitor our operating costs.” explained Ian Darcy, N.E.Wholesale’s Business Development Director.
A key feature in the choice of Aerotrack, a component of Aeromark’s Optimatics solution, by N.E. Wholesale was the flexibility of the software which enabled Aeromark to customise Aerotrack’s functionality to run tracking reports which exactly met N.E. Wholesale’s business requirements.
“Since deploying Aerotrack, we have instant visibility of the location of each and every one of our vehicles which has greatly helped us to meet our Service Level Agreements,” explained Darcy. “Additionally, we now track whether vehicles are taking the most direct routes to and from deliveries which helps monitor fuel usage, and we are now able to accurately monitor the productive hours worked by our drivers. We have also completely eliminated the costs associated with the private use of vehicles.” All of these benefits have helped N.E. Wholesale to reduce its overall operating costs.
“We did look at other telematics solutions on the market, but Aerotrack delivered the most cost effective price versus performance,” continued Darcy. “Aeromark has always responded very quickly to our requests for modifications to the solution as our business requirements change. The ‘starter-kill’ capability, which allows us to prevent a vehicle being moved in the event of it being stolen, is a key security feature for us.”
As a long standing customer, N.E. Wholesale regularly liaises with Aeromark to extend the deployment of Aerotrack as it adds vehicles to its fleet. The two companies regularly discuss developments to the solution that will continue to increase the productivity and efficiency and overall cost effectiveness of N.E. Wholesales’ vehicle fleet. The next phase may well be to expand the Aerotrack solution, so that it integrates with mobile computers issued to its drivers. This would allow N.E. Wholesale to deploy a complete end-to-end data capture mobility solution that would greatly reduce its current paper-based business processes around job scheduling, proof of delivery and stock inventory.
“In order for organisations to continue to operate profitably in the current economic recession, we all need to be looking at ways to work smarter in order to retain competitive advantage and ensure that we are delivering the highest possible customer service, at the same time as reducing operating costs and improving the bottom line,” concluded Darcy. “Aerotrack is playing a big role in helping us to achieve this today, and I am sure that Aeromark will continue to work with us to ensure that this is the case for tomorrow.”
