Family-run Tanat Valley Coaches has a fascinating history that goes back over a century, and we think there are similarities that can be compared to how the company operated then and how it does today in a digital world.
Based on the remote Shropshire / Welsh border, their forefather William Williams first started with a car to take passengers to places where the train didn’t go. A couple of years later, with his brother Elfyn Morris, they purchased a lorry to transport timber, stone, animal feed and fertiliser. They soon found that the people of the remote farms and villages also needed to get themselves and their produce into the weekly market at Oswestry. Every Wednesday the brothers would convert the lorry into a bus; using planks for seats and a canvas secured as a make-shift roof. The farms, cottages and small holdings along the back lanes became a regular route for the lorry/bus, and the service proved to be very successful, transporting the locals to market along with their calves, chickens, lambs, cheese, milk and eggs.
Fast forward 100 years, and this entrepreneurial spirit lives on through the company. They now operate a fleet of vehicles, from 16-seaters to 70-seater luxury coaches, their own on-site workshop, employ over 60 local people and transport around 1,500 schoolchildren to and from school every school day.
Tanat Valley Coaches are one of Aquarius’s newest ‘Digital to Digital’ coach customers; the team led by the company’s Transport Manager’ Trevor Wellstead and Operations Manager’ Zak Edwards, were already experienced in using an integrated digital system to manage their driver and vehicle compliance responsibilities, so first we asked them why the change?
Zak, who joined the company over a year ago said: “Prior to Aquarius, we were using a competitor’s product, but in all honesty, it was the support and the unresponsiveness of this service which left us frustrated the most – enquiries were automated / ticketed online and faceless so it was difficult to have two-way communications. With Trevor, we therefore decided to look for an alternative system and a company who we could simply pick the phone up to, and Aquarius ticked all the boxes – a proven and trusted software solution backed by a responsiveness ‘human’ support team.”
Being located in a rural location, we understood at the beginning that the one thing on your ‘wish list’ was to have a digital Driver Defect Check system that could also work offline in poor signal areas?
Yes, absolutely. The bedrock of the company’s history is finding solutions for rural communities to be able to live and work – and it’s no different now living in a digital age in a poor signal area. Everything was workable with the paper-based system we used, but uniquely with Aquarius we found a digital solution that would enable us to manage our daily driver defects in poor signal areas, offline.
For Trevor and I, this has proved to be a game changer administratively and logistically, as we can ensure drivers daily checks are sent to us even if the location that the driver did the daily check in has a poor signal. With Aquarius’s Defect Check App, the drivers can now perform the checks offline and then as soon as they get into a better signal area they can send the check through at the touch of a button. I’m not aware if there are any other systems that can do this, or at least not one that can be customised to this level.
What are the top 3 benefits of using Aquarius and an integrated solution of managing driver and vehicle data on one platform?
For me as Operations Manager:
- Everything related to driver and vehicle compliance being all in one area and that anything to do with a vehicle, be it a defect, repair or PMI is recorded digitally.
- As mentioned above, a major benefit is the driver defects now coming to me digitally, without me having to chase drivers when they come back to base.
- Being able to have two-way communications with drivers via the Aquarius App – being able to send infringements for example that they can look at remotely, and tell us what happened or sign-off.
With Asset Maintenance particularly, how have your fitters responded to using the system because we’ve positively noticed a high level of engagement from them and they have fed back some great development comments?
Our fitters have coped quite well with the change so far. When you put in any new system there are always challenges, and changes that are needed to suit your business, but so far, we have been able to ring up the Aquarius support team with any issues and they get listened to – and if possible, things are changed to suit us. We tried to get one person trained first who could operate the system, and they were then able to instruct the other fitters how to overcome any issues they faced – this has worked well.
For further information contact the Aquarius team via www.aquariusit.co.uk