Dawson Group is to offer FleetCheck fleet management software to its van rental customers as part of a strategic shift that will see it broaden its product offering.

The company, which is the largest independent asset rental business in the UK, plans to move beyond simply providing commercial vehicle rental to also offer multiple methods of vehicle acquisition and a dedicated tracking solution.

FleetCheck’s product will be provided on a white label basis to help ensure vehicle maintenance and driver compliance are managed properly within both Dawson’s customer base and its own maintenance team.

Chris Beeton, head of sales at Dawson Group, said: “We will be offering the software initially to our key accounts where we can examine the benefits for both ourselves and the customer. Once we have established the product, we will be rolling it out across our field sales team of 25 people covering the whole of the UK in early 2019.

“The software, we believe, will enable both our customers and ourselves to ensure routine maintenance checks are proactively scheduled and completed on time as well as providing us with an accurate view of the vehicles they operate. 

“A key factor will be the inclusion of FleetCheck’s walkaround vehicle check app which will ensure that our vehicles are being examined properly on a regular basis while providing our customers with piece of mind on vehicle compliance.”

Beeton said that Dawson chose to work with FleetCheck after looking at a wide range of fleet management software companies.

“The FleetCheck solution was the best fit for our business because we specialise in small fleet operators who are running fleets of 1-150 vehicles,” he said. “We have over a thousand live trading customers with an average vehicle on hire number of just four vans and the solution works very well for businesses that fall into this category.”

Peter Golding, managing director at FleetCheck, added: “We are very pleased to be working with Dawson on this project and helping to drive genuine benefits for their customers through our software. We are already creating a close operational partnership.”

Dawsongroup is a family business that was founded over 80 years ago and now operates 20,000 assets across nine different business units in more than 40 international locations in across seven countries.

The company’s van rental division has a national network of 13 strategically located sites, dedicated to supporting a fleet of 10,000 commercial vehicles.