July 2009

Given the prevailing  global credit crunch, a potential saving of R63 000 in fuel costs is hard to ignore. This is the amount Primedia Face 2 Face says it recouped last year after installing a new fleet management software tool called UBWhere. 

Designed and developed by local software solutions company, the ST Group, UBWhere is an online tracking system utilising what it terms “location intelligence” to help businesses operate more efficiently. 

ST Group ceo, Alan Ellis, says UBWhere can locate and track the whereabouts of a company’s vehicles at all times enabling the fleet to be better managed thus improving the efficiency of the fleet as a whole. 

“Being able to select the right vehicle closest to the required destination prevents wasteful kilometres being travelled, improves customer service and reduces total vehicle operating costs,” he says. 

With a fleet of 36 vehicles, servicing 10 400 retail points around the country, Primedia has come under increasing pressure to optimise delivery turnaround times. 

“The locations we service are typically independently owned township general dealers and communitybased supermarkets that do not always have a definitive street address,” explains Ant Cowling, Primedia F2F operations executive. 

“By geo-coding our delivery points, we calculated the shortest delivery routes and became more efficient when planning call cycles.” 

Overlaying this geographical map of Primedia’s retail points with marketing information derived from census, Primedia has been guided by LSM groups and population demographics on how to stock its retail points more intelligently, but has also been able to provide projections to its clients on how they can grow their brand footprint. 

Through the UBWhere’s live map tracking function, Cowling and his operations team are now able to track the movements of each individual vehicle as well as individual driver behaviour. 

For Cowling, a major benefit of the system is its ability to identify vehicle abuse. “As most of our delivery points are far from our regional depots, we entrust our vehicles to our drivers overnight. Until we had a chance to monitor the vehicle’s movements, we had no idea how much the vehicles were being used after hours” he explains. 

“Since we installed UBWhere, we have saved 7000 litres of fuel in the last year and an equally impressive amount on vehicle maintenance costs.”