Microlise and Lafarge Cement Mark Project Completion

The successful delivery and implementation of a Microlise Fleet & Distribution project conducted for Lafarge Cement UK was marked by a project sign off meeting and an afternoon of team building activities. Members of the Lafarge Cement and Microlise project teams met in Nottingham on 27th July to discuss the project and identify the experiences gained prior to formally signing of the project.

The event marked the culmination of the project to provide real-time schedule adherence monitoring and automatic vehicle location (AVL) for the fleet of 232 vehicles delivering cement from 12 manufacturing and distribution centres to customers throughout the UK. To achieve this, Microlise In-vehicle Computers (IVC) were installed in all the delivery vehicles and Microlise Transport Management Centre and mapping software was installed within each depot.

The system gives real-time visibility of the fleet of vehicles and automatically monitors delivery and departure times from each customer to build a complete picture of adherence to planned delivery schedule. Where problems have occurred in making a delivery, the vehicle driver can log the reason by sending a SMS message to the Transport Management Centre using his mobile phone. A full set of KPI management reports are available to analyse delivery and vehicle performance with the objective of identifying corrective methods and procedures to improve business performance.

David Hewitt, Lafarge Project Manager for Microlise commented, This project involved some significant new technology elements of the Microlise Fleet & Distribution portfolio. This project sign-off meeting has given Microlise and Lafarge Cement the opportunity to evaluate areas within the project that went well and those where problems could have been avoided. Overall, I think we concluded that effective communication is always the key to successful project implementation.

Simon Gray, Logistics Systems Co-ordinator at Lafarge Cement said, Working with Microlise on this project has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. We are already gaining significant benefits from the system by collating objective data on our delivery performance and importantly, by improving our ability to pro-actively communicate with our customers as to the state of their deliveries. I can already see future projects that can enhance our business and customer service through use of the telematics platform now installed in our vehicles.