Key Facts:
| Organisation: Australian Industry Trade College | Number of Schools: 6 |
| Fleet Size: 34 | Vehicle Use: Commuter vehicles, assigned and pool |
| Location: South East Queensland | Vehicle Type: Passenger vehicles, Utes and Vans |
| Website: www.deliberatelydifferent.com.au | LBM Products: Logbooks, Pool Bookings, Driver Safety, Fleet Operations, Fleet Optimisation |
The Australian Industry Trade College (AITC) are the leading school of choice for senior school students from grade 10 – 12 wanting a work-ready education with programs that are designed specifically to support employable industry skills.
To deliver these services, AITC’s fleet of 30+ vehicles is used by staff traveling to sites across South East Queensland, including six schools.
It was no secret to AITC that as the fleet was growing, its management was only becoming more complex, often impacting many teams. A single fleet manager was no longer the only point of call – finance, facilities, human resources, administration, safety and drivers could all, and would all play a critical role in ensuring the fleet ran smoothly and it was important they were supported to do so.
AITC saw the need for a centralised fleet management system to meet their operational requirements, both on a day-to-day basis and over the long term for all involved.
Early days
AITC’s early fleet management saw individual teams looking after their local operational needs in excel with no centralised view of information.
Furthermore, with their Fleet Management Organisation (FMO) only managing the physical aspect of supplying, leasing and servicing vehicles, LBM Fleet was brought in to centralise data and manage the digital aspects of fleet – electronic logbooks, booking systems and providing data on vehicle usage.
One centralised system and the LBM experience
Getting the basics right
After implementation, the LBM system provided AITC with fleet visibility including GPS data on pool vehicles and logbook trip data to directly improve operational effectiveness.
Best-in-class booking system
From here, LBM’s online booking system was rolled out to the whole organisation. Fleet, drivers and administrators from all schools could manage bookings in a centralised system.
LBM’s system could handle the complexity of having multiple administrators, each at different sites, each with tailored settings. Administrator users could have high level access based on the relevant schools that they managed, or extended access if this was permitted, making it easy for them to support the wider AITC team to book vehicles.
The AITC drivers were also set up to make bookings themselves in the LBM App, in addition to administration staff being able to book on behalf of drivers in the online portal, providing lots of options and flexibility for all.
With 20 years’ experience in the automotive industry, Savio Steves, Facilities and Fleet Manager at AITC said:
“The LBM Pool Booking System is the best one I’ve seen. The functionality of the system is excellent, it’s easy to use, and that’s what you want.”
“If bookings change and need to be modified, the AITC team could easily adjust bookings live in the platform, take vehicles out for servicing, all the things you’d expect. The accuracy and trust in the system resulted in high adoption of the system across the organisation from the beginning.”
Savio Steves, Facilities and Fleet Manager at AITC
Customer support that delivers
AITC’s dedicated Customer Success Manager from LBM Fleet, Sonya Franklin, also worked closely with the teams at AITC to ensure they were optimising every aspect of the LBM platform.
“Sonya is amazing to work with. Her expertise and knowledge of fleet has been invaluable to us. Having new people in the team is made easier with Sonya being there to assist with training and effectively acting like an extension of our fleet team” Savio Steves, Facilities and Fleet Manager, AITC.
Launch of AITC driver safety program
Shortly after fleet usage and booking systems were rolled out at AITC, the telematics data was also provided to the AITC Safety team, with initial data indicating that there may have been room for improvement.
After only a few short months of making this data available to drivers through the LBM app, drivers became more aware of their habits and their safety scores began to improve through self-correction. This gave the safety team data to plan the roll out of a broad-based driver safety program including one-on-one coaching meetings with drivers and ongoing reporting to the AITC Board on improvements.
“It’s important that we are aware of and understand the risks for our staff when driving. LBM helps us understand and reduce these risks by providing data that actually measures driver behaviour and fatigue effectively, and the right prompts and notifications to make changes or have the conversations with the right people when needed.”
Jessica Mangan, Work Health and Safety Advisor at AITC
The results speak for themselves with a huge improvement in Safety Scores across the organisation since the program was launched.
A cultural shift – strongest advocacy comes from drivers
So successful has been AITC’s driver safety program that the organisation chose to feature this program as part of National Road Safety Week on May 16.
Brad Pinch, AITC’s Future Schools and Partnerships Manager is one of the College’s success stories for staff improving their driving habits and gave an insight into how the LBM App has changed his driving.
“My role requires me to regularly travel between the six schools across South East Queensland with some trips taking over two hours. Depending on what my score is compared to the company average, this gives me an indication with how I’m going with my driving habits and behaviour.”
Brad’s story started by firstly becoming aware of his driving habits, including his drive times and break times. The LBM driver safety data was used by Brad to closely monitor what habits impact his Safety Score and where he needed improvement.
He has changed his habits in a number of ways to improve his safety score and become an overall safer driver including planning ahead for the week, booking accommodation for events and planning out rest stops when he knows his drive time will exceed the limit set within AITC’s policy.
“If LBM wasn’t there, I’d probably be driving as I was previously, which allowed for fatigue and didn’t allow for control of how you’re feeling relative to any data. Because we have data now, we can plan ahead and focus more on safety.”
Brad Pinch, Future Schools and Partnerships Manager at AITC
As AITC’s Work Health and Safety Advisor, Jess couldn’t be prouder of Brad’s and other driver’s journeys to safer driving. “Through a cultural shift by communicating regularly about driver safety, putting it on the agenda at safety meetings and putting the data in front of our executives to help them identify areas that need improvement, we’ve seen a significant increase in our driver safety scores across the organisation.”
Planning for future improvements in fleet at AITC
By using one centralised system that covers multiple aspects of fleet management, AITC has enhanced fleet management capability and expertise across the business, in fleet, facilities, administration, safety and management. Supported by LBM, maintaining this standard and achieving further improvements in fleet efficiency and driver safety will continue to be areas of focus going forward.
