Explore Transport improves logistic efficiency

Overview

• Explore Transport is one of the fastest growing haulage and plant hire businesses in the UK.
  

• They wanted to improve staff communication and increase delivery efficiency while maintaining quality.
  

• Explore achieved its goals with Vodafone Business One Net and Cloud and Hosting solutions.

Background

Explore Transport is a specialist provider of transport and plant hire, with a fleet of 150 vehicles and 300 staff around the UK.

Explore delivers equipment and materials to some of the biggest construction sites in the country: Crossrail, Northern Line, Manchester Airport and Hinkley Point.

Challenge

Explore Transport relies on drivers and mobile fitters

Explore Transport relies on drivers and mobile fitters working alongside office-based co-ordinators. 

Given the large scale of their projects, Explore’s primary challenge was to improve the communication between their drivers and co-ordinators, ensuring that communication wasn’t complicated by the growth of the workforce.

“Having all of those people joined up and communicating is absolutely key to running the business and enabling us to grow,”
David Cox,
Co-founder and managing director, Explore Transport 

The secondary challenge was to reduce fuel waste by ensuring trucks weren’t returning to the depots empty. Explore were looking to monitor which depots and vehicles were the most efficient and track when deliveries were made on time.  

To address their challenges, Explore needed a telematics (long-distance information transmission) solution with a central data storage hub, so that data could be accessed remotely, reviewed by project co-ordinators and used for decision making – all in real-time.

The Solution

One Net Business from Vodafone  

Trusting Vodafone’s reliable network and flexible communication capabilities, Explore Transport signed up for Vodafone’s One Net Business and Cloud and Hosting services.

Vodafone’s One Net is a secure cloud-based phone system that joins up landline and mobile communications, so your businesses and employees are always connected.

Meanwhile, the Cloud and Hosting services were paired with a telematics solution which can track vehicles and monitor equipment.

Results

Using One Net, Explore Transport can remain open 24 hours a day, without having to worry about missed calls from potential customers. 

Using Cloud and Hosting services, Explore Transport can track vehicles and monitor equipment onsite, with data accessible from anywhere. 

Now the business leadership team can rapidly make decisions, respond to incidents and offer accurate estimates of arrival times for deliveries. 

What’s more - communications between the internal teams that process rental requests and drivers making deliveries have also improved.