City West Works was established as a subsidiary of City West Housing Trust in April 2013 and carries out maintenance works on the housing association’s 14,600 homes across West Salford.

In its first year, the City West Works carried out almost 50,000 repairs jobs and answered more than 150,000 calls in its service centre.

The challenge

City West Works has a range of tradesman from roofers to electricians working in their team, all playing key roles in maintaining strong customer relations and working to improve customer homes. With many tradesmen on the road daily, City West Works needed a solution that could not only track their location but help reduce CO2 emissions and rising fuel costs.

The solution

Masternaut offered City West Works a solution that could provide benefits above and beyond simple vehicle tracking. Masternaut’s solution can monitor for poor driving habits through a points system where drivers are scored against vehicle economy and driving behaviour, alerting them to any bad manoeuvres they make.

Co-ordination challenges were also minimised with at-a-glance visibility of vehicle whereabouts at any given time.

The outcome

Since implementing Masternaut’s solution, City West Works has seen economical improvements in employee driving habits.  The solution has been installed across 105 of City West Works’ vehicles, with a plan to extend the contract for another two years.

Managers receive weekly email reports that accurately monitor and record the behaviour of their drivers and determine those who are exhibiting the best driving performance. Poor driving habits such as harsh; cornering, breaking, acceleration and speeding are all measured and put forward in these reports. Managers can then approach drivers performing poorly and discuss ways of improving their driving with guidance from Masternaut. These reports not only helped the managers gain a good overview of their team’s driver behaviour but also aided with their KPIs.

The Masternaut solution also provides an additional HR benefit with managers being able to remotely monitor their employees’ location in real time therefore providing added security. The solution can also help provide evidence against claims where customers state a tradesman has not turned up to a job.

Commenting on the results John Ashworth, Facilities Officer at City West Works said:

“Cutting down CO2 emissions and reducing fuel costs have been high priorities for us. We’ve saved just short of £17,000 in fuel alone and reduced CO2 emissions by 40.6 tonnes thanks to Masternaut’s solution. The reports Masternaut provide us with allows managers to see how drivers are wasting fuel and put a stop to this. Since April last year we have also started receiving a second report from Masternaut on a month to month basis showing how much fuel and Co2 savings we have made.

We chose Masternaut following a full process and when compared against competitors, Masternaut was the overall better choice against other tenders.”