A line in the sand
Nick Webb is fleet manager at bakery and catering equipment specialist Miller’s Vanguard. He tells us why the first thing he did was to implement Van Excellence as a benchmark for operational standards.
Miller’s Vanguard specialises in bakery and catering equipment for supermarkets. It supplies, installs, repairs and maintains a full range of equipment within the canteens, cafés, food-to-go counters and bakeries within stores, throughout the UK.
My background is in HGV fleet management so when I came to Miller’s Vanguard I wanted to see the existing professionalism become more consistent and standardised across the 240-strong van fleet. Many of our vehicles are out with engineers across the UK and this remote management makes ensuring compliance and best practice even trickier than usual.
For me, therefore, Van Excellence was a useful tool to ensure a basic consistent approach across the fleet. A line in the sand where we could say: standards never fall below this. It’s an achievable and measurable goal as your starting point.
We implemented various solutions to achieve our end goals, such as ensuring daily walk round checks or the cleanliness of vehicles, continually refining and improving our process until they were fast to implement from a driver’s point of view and easily monitored and managed for the fleet management team.
Van Excellence is a worthwhile process because it is the only tool available to smaller fleets which asserts your professionalism as equal to that of the major players in transport. Being able to demonstrate your dedication to proper fleet management is almost as important as implementing it, both from a compliance and a customer perspective.
To hear Nick Webb’s full journey to Van Excellence accreditation, come to the Van Excellence Operational Briefings 2015, held on 24 March in Weybridge and 27 March in Birmingham.
