Fifty vehicles, 350 employees and 500 buildings: The AVANT Gebäudedienst GmbH team is on the road every day. Recently, the firm began using an IoT-based solution for its fleet management. The digitalization effort has paid off with better customer service and around 20 percent lower costs.

The situation is fairly straightforward for gardening staff: they normally do one job a day, so they only have to drive to one location. It’s completely different, however, with the building cleaners or caretakers working for the eastern German company AVANT GmbH: They often do up to five assignments a day at five different buildings. Still, for a long time, AVANT managed their vehicle fleet entirely manually.

CHALLENGING ROUTE PLANNING

The fleet management was handled by Managing Director Steffen Lange via Google Maps according to existing customer orders. And what about spontaneous job enquiries? Special services? Or questions about when exactly a cleaning team would arrive? In such cases, the only thing that helped was to pick up the phone and quickly reroute drivers already on the road.

DIGITAL LOGBOOK REQUIRED

In addition, AVANT wanted to better position itself in Germany’s hotly contested market for qualified building cleaners. A convenient digital driver's log is more attractive to these in-demand specialists than the usual one-percent regulation for the private use of vehicles.

AVANT therefore decided in 2018 to introduce a digital IoT solution for its fleet management. In addition to improving customer service, the solution was also designed to reduce the company's costs. Especially since the building management industry generally has little room to maneuver in terms of price. "Customers save on the last link in their chain of expenditures – and that’s these contract cleaners. We have to be flexible timewise and fight every day," says Managing Director Lange.

DIY INTERNET OF THINGS

AVANT started using Telekom's IoT cloud-based solution Drive & Track powered by Fleet Complete in the summer of 2018. Initially, 23 dongles equipped with IoT sensors were deployed. These GPS tracking devices can be easily plugged into the vehicles without costly installation, as they all have an OBD2 interface for on-board diagnostics. Lange and his team installed the ready-to-use IoT dongles equipped with SIM cards themselves in just 14 days. And the process only lasted two weeks because the vehicles were on the road with customers in three states across Germany.

Thanks to GPS technology linking the devices to the IoT platform, the Drive & Track portal shows almost in real-time how the planned routes are going and where the vehicles are located. The application allows for smart route optimization options that can now be identified at a glance and quickly implemented. This pays off: After only three months of using the Telekom software, AVANT recorded 15 to 20 percent lower costs – while achieving better customer service at the same time. In particular, more efficient fuel consumption due to optimized routes and working hours is clearly impacting the service provider's bottom line.

FOUR BENEFITS IN ONE PACKAGE

The IoT-based technology Drive & Track provided AVANT with four benefits in one package: optimized routes, better customer service, time tracking and an electronic logbook. The AVANT team installed the smart solution and trained their staff themselves. And if there were any questions, a direct contact person was always available from Telekom. They ensured that AVANT's individual wishes were fulfilled on short notice, for example, making sure the automatic transfer of customer master data to the new software went smoothly. Thanks to this dedicated service and more, AVANT is very satisfied with its solution and is convinced the cost-benefit ratio is right on the money.