Leeds, UK, 28 February 2008 – Leading soft drink manufacturer Britvic Soft Drinks is equipping its entire fleet of field service vehicles with a leading-edge web-based real-time satellite tracking service from Masternaut Three X, which provides precise reporting of all vehicle activities. Following a 12-week trial of the Masternaut service, Britvic has already realised a 10 per cent reduction in travel time, which equates to substantial savings in fuel costs and a reduction in the fleet's emissions.
Britvic has an extensive team of 167 field-based technicians who install and service draught soft drinks and vending machines. The team covers the whole of the UK and is allocated into 14 regions. Masternaut will enable Britvic's Service Planning Department to manage job schedules better by helping management to combine planned and reactive jobs, which optimises routing, boosts efficiencies and customer satisfaction levels, while reducing fuel costs and cutting emissions.
"We are very pleased with the initial results from Masternaut as we have already realised a 10 per cent reduction in travel time, which underlines the business case for applying the service across the entire service fleet. Reducing travel time not only saves on fuel costs and reduces emissions it has also increased our responsiveness and customer satisfaction levels," says Mike King, Technical Service Planning Manager, Britvic.
Britvic is using several reports generated by Masternaut to gain real-time visibility of 'idling time' to improve driving styles and reduce vehicle emissions, differentiate between business and private mileage, provide actual working hours for payroll, develop efficient routes between jobs and assign the nearest available technician for urgent call-outs.
"We have 14 flexible service regions with workloads split between maintenance and new installations. To provide maximum service levels we run a 7-day staggered shift that operates from 9am to 9pm. Masternaut allows us to increase productivity by integrating planned and reactive work. This enables us to optimise workloads and lets us easily slot in planned jobs between reactive maintenance," says Mike King.
Britvic says that Masternaut provides a platform for future development of its service management systems. Mike King concludes: "The Masternaut Three X team has worked closely with us to develop a service that fits our needs. We look forward to going live with the Masternaut service in January 2008 and are very confident that we will achieve greater efficiencies for our whole operation."