Millers Vanguard is based in Bury, Lancashire, and is one of Britain’s leading suppliers, installers and maintainers of bakery and catering equipment, with a total of 240 Mercedes-Benz vans on its fleet, comprising Vito and Sprinter models alongside a smaller number of 7.5-tonne Mercedes-Benz Atego trucks.
The FTA accreditation has shown its commitment to the highest standards of fleet operation, and signifies that its vehicles meet demanding levels of roadworthiness, safety and compliance with all legislation, while its drivers are also trained, supervised and licensed to exacting criteria.
The initiative was driven by Millers Fleet Manager Nick Webb, who joined the company a year ago. From his background in heavy truck operation, dealing with a more heavily regulated environment, Webb was keen to introduce a set of consistent, measurable standards across the company’s light commercial vehicle fleet.
“Van operators are not subject to the same level of legislation but I wanted to implement a code of conduct to ensure a similar level of monitoring – and I found that the Van Excellence programme already offered exactly what I wanted,” he said.
“We run 100 vans from our headquarters but the rest are out with engineers across the UK, which makes ensuring compliance and best practice even trickier than usual. Van Excellence proved to be an invaluable tool to ensure a uniform approach across the fleet; it allowed us to draw a line in the sand below which standards must never fall.
“We implemented various solutions to achieve our end goals, such as instigating daily walk-round checks and ensuring the cleanliness of vehicles. Since then we’ve been continually refining and improving our processes to make them quick and simple to implement from a driver’s point of view, and easily monitored for the fleet management team.”
Mr Webb added: “Van Excellence is a worthwhile process because it is the only tool available to smaller fleets which asserts their professionalism as equal to that of the major players in transport. Being able to demonstrate your dedication to proper fleet management is almost as important as implementing it, both from a compliance and a customer perspective.”
