ATL opens Midlands hub

A new commercial vehicle service centre has opened at national transport and logistics solutions provider ATL’s newly opened Midlands Hub, near Derby. 

Acting as a sister company to ATL, Haywood Commercials will maintain ATL’s fleet of approximately 100 commercial vehicles and 150 trailers as well as providing services to third party commercial clients. 

According to workshop manager George Haywood, as well as expanding and modernising its engineering facilities, investing in the latest IT and software systems has also been a priority and this has involved a full review of available software for managing the operation. 

After selecting software from Freeway Fleet Systems to underpin the new service, he said, ‘We looked extensively at the leading fleet maintenance systems and although many did certain tasks very well it became clear that only one offered the comprehensive functionality we needed. It was a system from Freeway that met our needs and the system has clear advantages for operators like us that need to optimise efficiency and productivity with a fully integrated all-in-one system.’ 

ATL uses Stirling’s transport management system and this is being run in parallel to Freeway initially as roll out of Freeway is underway.  The two systems interface so fleet operations always have visibility of vehicle availability and fleet data is synchronised to minimise any secondary data entry.

‘The fact that it could interact and easily accept data from both internal and external systems was an important additional benefit of Freeway,’ added the Group’s system administrator, Jamie Norvaisa.

George said, ‘Freeway gives us absolute control as we can clearly see all our costs right down to shillings and pence. It also means we can maximise our efficiency and with performance reports generated by the system we’ll be able to fine tune everything to optimise use of our resources.’