Case study

County Fleet Care (which looks after Staffordshire County Council’s 770 vehicles and plant, along with 600 police vehicles) is investing £25,000 to £30,000 on Civica’s Tranman modules.

Engineering manager Tony Richards is confident the upgrades will pay for themselves within six months due to increased workshop productivity and reduced administration.

Richards spent several months reviewing County Fleet Care’s existing Tranman system and analysing how people were using it.

“We found there were lots of duplications and errors being made,” Richards explains. “The workshop supervisors had ended up in admin roles, raising invoices or quotes, instead of driving the workshop floor and increasing productivity.”

Following initial discussions with Civica on possible system changes, a steering group was set up with representatives from finance, fleet and the workshop to provide input on various functions.

The past three months have been spent testing, with the system due to go live this month. “Civica took a snapshot of our system and created a mirror system,” Richards says. “All the testing happens in the mirror system so you don’t have to disrupt your system.”

Benefits

The upgrades will mean quotes can be raised quickly and jobs can be created from templates.

“Before it might have taken five or 10 minutes to create a job whereas now a job can be raised in seconds,” Richards says. “Information is pre-populated and there’s no need to spend time looking up price lists.”

Stock levels can also be checked easily and there is a warning if there are not enough parts to service a vehicle.

Workshop touchscreens have been introduced which mean technicians simply enter a PIN code and see what has been allocated rather than waiting for a supervisor to fill in a job card.

“It’s more of a seamless process now,” Richards says.

Customer communication will also be improved due to the addition of Tranman’s automatic email functionality so drivers are automatically emailed when their vehicle is ready for collection.

Invoicing accurately and on time (meaning that the council is paid quicker) is another benefit.

“We can set rules in the system to ensure that the discounts we have agreed with customers are followed and we invoice correctly,” Richards says.

Tranman’s document and image management module has also been introduced so that emails, pdfs and images can be dragged and dropped onto the system and means the workshop can become paperless if it wishes.

Click here to see a touchscreen example