A leading provider of outsourced fleet management services has selected Microsoft mobile applications development specialist Oakwell Solutions to provide it with an Internet-based reporting and management tool.
Fleet Africa, a subsidiary of the Johannesburg Securities Exchange-listed Super Group, is a fleet management company servicing the public and private sectors. With some 20 000 vehicles under its management, the company provides a range of options to its clients including full maintenance leasing, operating lease, managed maintenance and sales and leaseback.
Owing to the nature of its business - managing the vehicles of its clients - reporting is an integral and vital component of its business.
Rodney Power, general manager: Information Technology at Fleet Africa, explains: "Our business is centred around unlocking the maximum value from our clients` fleets. Every vehicle in each fleet - and fleets are as large as 7 000 or more trucks, cars and buses - must be maintained, licensed, insured and when necessary, disposed of, in the most cost-effective and efficient manner possible," he says.
Power also notes that there are penalties should agreed service levels not be met. "Reporting is therefore critical to the effective and profitable operation of our business - both for ourselves, and for our clients as we must satisfy them that they are benefiting from outsourced, as opposed to in-house, fleet management," he says.
The company approached Oakwell Solutions when it realised that the manual production of reports was cumbersome, time-consuming and costly. "With the level of administration required, we needed a standard platform that would allow us to report to all our clients across diverse locations. We also sought to reduce the costs of reporting as it was taking seven or eight people to write the reports, keeping them away from their line-of-business activities," says Power.
A specialist Microsoft enterprise applications developer, Oakwell Solutions proposed a solution dubbed FleetZone that would deliver the reporting and management functionality sought by Fleet Africa. Managing director Roy Hobson explains the challenge: "We were faced with a situation where there was a variety of information sources that had to be consolidated in order to deliver a holistic report on the fleet of any one of the client`s customers. Additionally, we wanted to put the capability to produce a report in the hands of Fleet Africa`s customers, so they could rapidly generate ad hoc reports at any time," he says.
As such, Oakwell opted for an Internet hosted application that can be accessed via a standard browser.
"The development of the solution was driven predominantly by the need for easy access to detailed information which would demonstrate whether or not contract requirements were being met. It has, however, grown into a fully fledged data warehouse that includes data from many sources, including Auto Fuelling systems, petrol payments from banks, and even from client systems," says Power.
He notes that before engaging with Oakwell, detailed expectations from the solution. "We knew what we wanted, and Oakwell proved to be an excellent partner in providing the necessary technology to create the solution. It designed the application using Microsoft .NET technology with Microsoft reporting services. By using .NET, the solution offers the added ability to integrate with our workflow, providing full electronic document management and unified messaging for ease of use," says Power.
As a result of the solution, Fleet Africa has been able to introduce a more advanced level of intelligence to its business. "We`re able to collect and display a wide variety of critical information and with dashboarding functionality we can manage operations for optimal performance. Additionally, there is a significant benefit in the fact that the solution allows us to very quickly generate a report and act on the information," he says.
Information from the estimated 20 000 vehicles is delivered from various sources into the Fleet Zone solution, with over 300 000 records uploaded in a flat file format every day. Owing to the solution design, Hobson says it takes just six minutes to import this information using File Transfer Protocol. "We had to opt for the relatively old FTP method owing to the limitations imposed by older systems from which we had to import data. Typically, FTP is not a particularly rapid method of data transfer, but with the assistance of Microsoft SA, we are able to get a remarkably good transfer speed," he notes, adding that Oakwell`s Microsoft Gold Partner status was instrumental in securing the vendor`s participation.
Ultimately, the Fleet Zone solution also puts the capability of generating a report into the hands of Fleet Africa`s clients - they can access the solution via the Internet and pull reports at any time to rapidly understand the performance of their fleet management partner.
The data from the solution can also be exported to an Excel format, while plans are afoot to introduce further analysis services. And because it is a Web-based solution, rolling out Fleet Zone to new clients is a simple matter, notes Power.
"In the fleet management business, information is key to knowing whether or not a fleet of vehicles is being managed for maximum efficiency. We`ve seen a definite improvement with the implementation of Fleet Zone; with the commitment and expertise of Oakwell, we believe this has given us a real competitive advantage," he concludes.
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