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What Van? Awards 2019: SMR Award – ARI Fleet UK
Date: Thursday, December 13, 2018
Positive feedback from a stream of blue-chip clients, countrywide coverage, and a commitment to technology that enables businesses to cut costs, has helped major-league fleet management specialist ARI Fleet UK win What Van?’s Service, Maintenance and Repair Award for 2019.
With 89,000 vehicles on its books, ARI has access to a nationwide workshop network
under the Masterserve banner that offers everything from free collection and delivery to fixed-price servicing.
It is geared to reducing downtime and expenditure.
ARI’s Masterview system, meanwhile, transmits live pictures of vehicles being worked on direct to the company’s own expert technicians, allowing them to, in effect, be present in the workshop and authorise work on behalf of the fleet operator.
And then there’s VDV – Vehicle-Downtime-View – which enables constant tracking of vehicle off-road (VOR) times. It means workshops can be geofenced so that ARI can see exactly how long vans are spending in them and how soon they are back on the road earning their owners money. It also ensures that customers are only billed for the exact hours the van was being worked on.
It can check, too, that vehicles are at the locations they are booked into for service and repair when they are supposed to be.
Among those clients benefitting from VDV is a builders’ merchant. The technology has helped reduce the average time its vehicles are off the road due to accident damage from 20 days to eight.
Furthermore, its commercial vehicles are now scoring a 99.9% MoT pass rate thanks largely to ARI’s efforts.
With ARI’s help, the company is able to budget accurately over the lifecycle of each of its fleet assets and smooth out cost spikes and unexpected expenditure. The savings identified by ARI have helped its client reduce spending by more than £800,000 a year.
A technology and healthcare company, too, has benefitted from ARI’s assistance, with the latter providing the former with a full service, maintenance and repair budget based on the age and mileage of each of its vehicles plus visibility of and control over actual spending through Insights, ARI’s fleet management platform.
A three-year trial was held to see if maintenance efficiencies and cost-savings could be achieved. They could, and were followed by rigorous management of every maintenance job plus regular strategic reviews.
As a result, the client was able to cut spending on maintenance by an average of more than £1,000 over a vehicle’s life, with a 65.8% saving achieved in the first 12 months alone.
There is no doubt that the firm’s expertise is helping fleets drive down expenditure without compromising efficiency. So we’re happy to present ARI with 2019’s SMR accolade.
Highly Commended: Free2Move Lease Command
Operators and drivers who overlook the need for vehicles to be serviced could benefit hugely from Free2Move Lease (F2ML) Command.
Offered to F2ML customers, it delivers servicing reminders along with operational support to help fleets manage service, maintenance and repair costs.
Vehicle data is transmitted using telematics, and if a van requires a service then the F2ML Command team sends an email notification. Arrangements can then be made to get it booked into a dealership and the team will monitor what is happening until the work is completed.
The package is provided as standard with F2ML contracts lasting 18 months or more. Customers can upgrade from Level 1 to F2ML Command Level 2, which delivers further support services.
F2ML was formed last year when PSA Group brought together Citroen Contract Motoring and Peugeot Contract Hire, thereby creating a major new contract hire brand.
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