Tyldesley Distribution Services case study

Tyldesley Distribution Services Ltd. is a family-owned and managed company with more than 35 years experience of working in the transport industry.

Company Overview

Industry

General haulage

Sector

Logistics

Products

Fleet Size

70-plus class HGVs and more than 100 trailers ranging from standard curtain siders and flatbeds with extra length and mega trailers

Transport Manager

Dave Mason

The way things used to be

TDS has its own busy workshop facilities, operating 14 hours a day, with often 3 inspections a day taking place, alongside repair, MoT and servicing work.

All of this work was documented in paper reports by technicians, and these records were held at the Tyldesley workshop, while its HQ was in Bolton, 25 miles away.

Problems they faced & how r2c solved them

This amount of work, and the pace of it, meant that every day a huge amount of paperwork was produced, not only for the technicians to fill in and complete, but for Transport Manager Dave Mason to sift through and check.

The sheer volume meant that Dave was making the 2-hour round trip to the workshop 4 times a week to collect it all – effectively taking a day out the working week in total.

While the system worked, it was a huge time and administrative burden, and there could be a lag between a problem being flagged and the end result being seen by Dave and his team. This meant that it was harder to keep an eye on trends and issues, which made making strategic decisions for the fleet operation more difficult.

One of the issues TDS also faced was ensuring that drivers were regularly spotting defects on the daily walk rounds. When defects were noted in inspection paperwork filed by technicians, it took more time for Dave Mason to join the dots between drivers missing defects and when they were spotted in the workshop.

Now, because those defects are flagged and reported to him straight away by technicians through the r2c platform, it’s easier for him to contact drivers and remind them of their responsibilities.

“You need to show drivers what they’ve been missed on walk rounds, so they get into the habit of spotting everything. After, there’s a clear improvement in focus about the condition of the vehicle and trailers. In turn, this has a knock-on effect in terms of improving safety, VoR and compliance,” said Dave.

The aim

By installing r2c’s Core system, TDS was looking to streamline its administration and give the leadership team better accessibility to documentation, provide more immediate oversight of what’s going on in the workshop, and to improve compliance, efficiency and SMR planning.

r2c was able to onboard a six strong team onto the platform using online training in only 2 weeks.

“r2c was so quick and simple to implement, and easy for our technicians to use. While it’s saving me the best part of a day a week, for the technicians r2c Core has massively reduced the time it takes to complete documentation compared to when they had to work on paper,” said Dave.

Additional benefits they’ve found

Now that TDS has more data easily to hand, it has been able to put in place a set of KPIs that measure vehicle off road levels, defects, and repair times. This means the board has a much better understanding of the day-to day operational status and capacity of their fleet, as well as being able to see any trends in damage or defects, workshop effectiveness, and also be sure they are fully compliant.