A leading lift company in the London region, Apex operates a mixed car and van fleet of 66 vehicles and originally introduced the Quartix technology in 2007 as part of a move to improve its Health & Safety, notably for any lone workers. Since then the firm has gradually been installing the tracking systems to the remainder of its fleet and it is now used extensively across all departments.
The live tracking is used by the call desk co-ordinators throughout the day to see where the engineers are and utilise the Address Search to monitor the engineers in the closest proximity to the breakdown site. This is also essential to apply a swift response to passenger ‘trap-ins’. The live tracking on Google Maps includes Map, Satellite and Street views as well as live traffic information, enabling their co-ordinators to plan trips and despatch jobs efficiently.
‘It helps us to be very responsive and always improve our customer service,’ said Mick Holderness, production director at Apex Lifts. ‘If we have an engineer who is 20 miles away and one who is two miles away, we need to send the right engineer to the job. We want to reduce the time someone is stuck in a lift so it is crucial to despatch the closest vehicle to a site.’
The Quartix Route Maps, which display each trip with colour-coded speed symbols, and the Route Charts, which highlight all trips taken over a day or a week, are also used by Apex Lifts to optimise itineraries.
‘We operate in an increasingly competitive environment so we have to reduce our costs to cater for that. We analyse the routes taken and shuffle them around to make it more economically viable – this helps us reduce our fuel consumption and save time,’ said Mick Holderness.
Other key features used by Apex Lifts are the timesheets and reports, which provide extensive detail of the vehicles’ activity. The mileage reports for example are checked by supervisors to ensure private mileage is accurately recorded.
‘We check the mileage reports as it is now our Company’s responsibility to report on private mileage to the Inland Revenue,’ explained Holderness.
Apex Lifts says it’s ‘really happy with the Quartix system’ and is fitting trackers into each new vehicle as the company replaces them.
