Vella Group slashes repair time with new courtesy car programme
Vella Group has reduced its average vehicle repair time by around two days by developing a more efficient and productive operation, facilitated by working with Enterprise Rent-A-Car to improve the provision of replacement vehicles to customers.
Vella Group has adopted Enterprise’s Full Mobility Programme at all six of its bodyshops to support around 11,000 qualifying repairs per year. This means that all its replacement vehicles and logistics are provided through local Enterprise rental branches.
Vella Group and Enterprise have worked together, focusing on key-to-key times to reduce repair duration and vehicle hire periods. A key success factor has been the efficiencies created by deploying Enterprise’s suite of communications and rental management technology tools, which have enabled the reduction of two days on average.
Vella has also been able to redeploy admin and office employees whose time had previously been burdened with all of the processes required of managing such a large number of vehicles, from procurement and valeting, fuelling, fines and other day-to-day requirements, through to the eventual vehicle disposal.
The Group reports a number of other visible benefits as a result of introducing Enterprise’s Full Mobility Programme:
- Work provision is now wholly based on bay and mechanic capacity rather than on courtesy car availability.
- Vella Group has also been able to dispose of the fleet of several hundred courtesy cars required across its bodyshops to meet demand for mobility from customers.
- Admin employees are now re-focused on core bodyshop management work, and are no longer burdened with fleet management duties ranging from servicing, maintenance and cleaning to bookings, fines and damage claims.
- There is no longer a need to ‘double fleet’, when existing courtesy cars were being prepared for disposal while new vehicles were awaiting delivery.
As MD of one of the UK’s largest independent vehicle repair groups, Vella Group’s Marc Holding believes that bodyshops across the UK could benefit from rethinking provision of replacement vehicles with a provider such as Enterprise.
“Partnering with Enterprise to rethink how we provide customers with the mobility they need began with the realisation that the larger we grew, the more we were essentially becoming a rental car business. We were managing several hundred vehicles instead of focusing on repair,” Holding said.
“We’ve done more than replace a courtesy car from us with a rental car from Enterprise. Because Enterprise supports work providers directly, who are booking cars on the same software platform, they are able to provide mobility at the most logical and efficient point after an accident – which isn’t necessarily when the vehicle comes into one of our bodyshops. This means we are only providing a car to a customer through Enterprise when that is the right decision and a vehicle hasn’t been provided elsewhere.
“The costs we’ve reduced with the Full Mobility Programme are only the tip of the iceberg. We no longer spend time procuring, managing and off-hiring a large fleet of vehicles as Enterprise does all that for us. We know our customers will always have access to a car because Enterprise’s branches have thousands of them for hire exactly when they’re needed,” Holding added.
