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(JAN 2009) CHARLES TRENT LTD, a UK market leader in the processing of end-of-life vehicles, has agreed to purchase and implement Transvision Fleet Planner for the scheduling of their fleet of 35 car transporters.
The head office of the family-owned company is located in Poole, and their car transporters are used for the collection and transportation of end-of-life vehicles to their 5 processing plants across the UK. This collection takes place either on behalf of insurance companies following accidents or from individuals and companies when the vehicles are no longer economically viable to maintain. The vehicles in question are recycled, and their salvaged parts are, whenever possible, sold for use on other vehicles.
In 2008, Charles Trent recognised that their fleet of 35 car transporters located at their 5 depots was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and that it required a significant amount of skill and time to organise efficiently. Among other things, the complexity is a result of the collection requests from the different insurance companies, which vary from collection within 24 hours to collection within 72 hours. In addition, the collected vehicles are in varying states, including undrivable. Finally, all the loading configurations of the transporters have to be considered when creating a route. This level of complexity inevitably meant that planning was a time-consuming task.
By implementing Transvision Fleet Planner, Charles Trent will remove the manual planning process completely, and the system will decide the time of collection and which route to use. Transvision Fleet Planner’s ability to handle complex loading rules, time windows and service promises automatically means that the system will require minimal manual intervention and free up back-office resources for the performance of other valuable tasks. Moreover, the ability to optimise across several days will ensure that the company maximises the use of the fleet at all time and minimises mileage. In the longer term, Charles Trent intends to deploy a mobile on-board solution on their fleet and take advantage of the real-time optimisation capabilities of Transvision Fleet Planner. This will allow them to optimise routes on the fly and drive the last few percent of value from their assets.
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