Fleet Training Manager at Tesco.com, Cliff Cheeseman, was an invited panelist in the “Improving Driver safety and efficiency” session at the annual Fleet & Asset Management Conference in Amsterdam on the 4th (& 5th) April 2011.
Cliff spoke in a Q&A session with around 200 delegates about the benefits the introduction of Telematics has brought to the Tesco.com business and how they successfully embedded the technology within their daily operational processes to ensure they achieved the targeted benefits as timely as possible.
The main benefits Cliff spoke of that the Microlise system has delivered to Tesco.com included:
Over a 10% improvement in fuel consumption in the 1st year – which equated to a fuel cost saving of over 1.4 million pounds.
A further 4% fuel saving in the 2nd year
A sustained level of driving efficiency in subsequent years, with store level baselines and targets being constantly reviewed so as to drive continuous improvement, built around a robust assessment and training regime Cliff has put in place
Off the back of these successes in improved driving efficiency, Cliff then used the Microlise system to focus further on safe driving. Using Microlise’s contextual speeding reports, Cliff explained how Tesco.com has been able to drastically reduce levels of speeding and reduce the number of accidents and incidents accordingly.
Microlise’s Contextual Speeding module, looks up every tracking event returned by each tracked vehicle, against the posted road speed for the segment of road the vehicle is reporting from. The module then applies a tolerance (e.g. 10% + 2 mph) to each speed and flags whether the vehicle and the associated driver was speeding.
Cliff, his trainers and the .com managers at each store can then review a league table of which drivers have been speeding, in which speed limits and how many times they have infringed.
Cliff explained when they initially implemented this solution, there was around 20,000 infringements per day across a fleet of over 2500 vans.
When the report was launched to the business, infringements immediately fell to 12,000 per day. Through consistent driver debriefs and performance improvement processes put in place, Cliff stated that this level had fallen to around 2,000 infringements per day. This equates to less than one speeding event per van per day.
This is a staggering accomplishment when you consider the vehicles are used for around 15 hours per day, everyday of the week, and the fleet on average drives over 1.6 million miles per week.
When asked the question about how the system and processes had been received by the Tesco.com operation, Cliff simply stated that their driver churn or attrition rates had fallen from 40% to 10% in the years since the Microlise telematics solution had been implemented.
As well as continuing to focus on driving style for safe and fuel efficiency, Cliff also explained that Tesco.com are using the tracking data generated by the Microlise system to better understand leg speeds and traffic flow at different times of the day and also what delivery windows times need to be built into their planning models based upon address and dwelling type such that they can best optimise their planning systems.
Tesco.com operate over 2,500 LCV vans delivering to customer homes across the UK from over 300 stores. Tesco.com implemented Microlise telematics in 2008.
