Saving time with Felixstowe Travel

Felixstowe Travel operates a fleet of 12 executive coaches and buses, and they specialise in offering customers luxury excursions and day trips from Ipswich, Woodbridge & Felixstowe, as well as airport transfers, and school coach hire. They are a long-standing customer of our tacho analysis software services, and recently, having successfully achieved DVSA’s Earned Recognition (ER) status, they added Asset Maintenance and Defect Check to their back-office systems, which has given them an all-encompassing ‘connective’ fleet management software solution for reporting on both driver and vehicle activity. 

After several months of using the system, we caught up with Alan Braybrooke, the co-owner of Felixstowe Travel, to see how they are finding our ER-approved software solutions.

What are the main reasons you decided to take on Defect Check and Asset Maintenance?

Our main reasons were ease of use. We have an in-house fitter, but all of our vehicle maintenance services are carried out by local third parties.  Therefore, we needed an ER-approved system that would enable us to centrally log what work has been done on each vehicle and by who. In turn for ER, this gives us a digital audit trail that we can simply report on each month.

We also specifically like that the Aquarius interface is very easy to use and fairly intuitive; and for ER specifically, the proactive, real-time warnings help us keep track and up to date with all our compliance responsibilities related to driver and vehicle activity.  

With Asset Maintenance in particular, can we talk about the benefits from a planning and scheduling perspective of services, PMIs, Brake Testing, MOTs, and Tax Renewals for example?

We love how all the information is in one place, and can show all the jobs for each vehicle individually or as a fleet on one screen. This used to be managed on various spreadsheets, which made it time-intensive to administer, but now we simply click a button and all the information is there visually, in one place ready to action, analyse and report on.

With it being a legal requirement to evidence a rolling 52-week planner of all vehicle maintenance requirements, having a visual forward planner like this, that automatically populates service and renewal dates, also helps us see if there are going to be any conflicts when planning tours and future customer bookings.   

What about the link with the Defect Check?

We find how the Defect App (which I like for being customisable) integrates with Asset Maintenance to be very useful, and a key business benefit. With the defect checks being automatically added to the system in real-time, we can action any maintenance requirements immediately. This is not only vitally important from a safety perspective but it also saves us time and money in the long run – for example, we can get a minor repair like a windscreen chip fixed before it becomes a bigger, more costly job.

What are the overall benefits of having a connected system for driver and vehicle data?

At the end of the day, the biggest benefit to us is saved administration time. We are a small team, and this helps us stay compliant with the minimum amount of time required – in turn, this gives us more time to focus on our main business and serving our customers.

Any other comments?

With over 20 years of experience in dealing with maintenance, I find Aquarius’s software the easiest to use for our business. The online and telephone support is also on point, and even for more unusual issues they are always answered quickly and effectively.

For further information contact the Aquarius team via www.aquariusit.co.uk