Two heads are better than one - as market leading companies ByBox and Masternaut are proving by trading clever ways to give each other a competitive edge in their respective fields and save money at the same time.
ByBox is improving Masternaut's carbon footprint and the efficiency of its field service engineers by an ingenious method of delivering parts to them, while Masternaut is helping ByBox to closely track each vehicle in its fleet.
ByBox is the UK market leader for field service solutions in the UK. It delivers 20 million parcels a year into 18,000dropboxes all over the UK; from Truro to Inverness to Belfast, and most towns in between. It also has locations in France, the Republic of Ireland and the Benelux; as well as network of Pick Up Drop Off sites.
ByBox' customers are companies with mobile engineers who fix broken machines and reps who need urgent medical materials. The companies they work with operate in a variety of sectors; all very demanding and completely intolerant of failure. In the middle of the night, ByBox delivers mission-critical parcels to the network of drop boxes. It is the tooth fairy for high-tech deliveries and set about solving a problem that Masternaut was having.
Masternaut is Europe's leading mobile resource management provider specialising in Vehicle & Asset Tracking and Mobile Workforce Applications. The company serves thousands of businesses across Europe who trust Masternaut to deliver solutions that deliver tangible business benefits and return on investment. Masternaut engineers install a variety of equipment, mainly GPS vehicle tracking units which give their customers total visibility of their assets and vehicles.
Masternaut used to have its goods and ancillary equipment delivered direct to customers by carriers and then it would schedulean engineer to come and fit them. It was a solution but not the most efficient system and there were inevitable, unavoidable delays and costs. These were compounded by the fact that Masternaut operates two sets of field engineers: 25 of its own engineers and a business partner with access to an additional 80 engineers.
ByBox came up with a solution whereby it receives the Masternaut parts into its Distribution Hub where they are consolidated into individual engineer consignments. Each consignment contains the multiple parts and equipment the engineer needs to carry out his assigned work schedule. The consignment is then delivered overnight to a drop box location selected by the engineer and deposited into the designated box by 8am that morning to await collection.
With ByBox' vast network, no box is ever far from an engineer. In fact, since using ByBox, engineers have been able to reduce their travel to collect consignments to an average of five miles, saving time, mileage and fuel costs.
ByBox provides the Masternaut engineers with several other key features; they have access to the ByBox website which enables them to generate their own tracking labels and they can also use the same delivery box to return unused parts or those for repair or disposal. ByBox then automatically re-routes these parts back to their point of origin or directly to the repairer.
The ByBox service also includes delivery to Masternaut engineers in Northern Ireland via a Belfast Distribution Centre, giving the company complete coverage using the same efficient system.
In addition to distribution, Masternaut uses ByBox' Technical Courier service, which helps repair and replace broken equipment more cost-effectively. With access to field service technicians all around the UK, ByBox offers a 4 hour, same day and next day response to fix, collect or swap out machines and components.
If a piece of equipment goes down, ByBox' team of Technical Couriers can carry out scripted repairs and collections or simply pick up a replacement piece from their warehouse or Forward Stock Location and exchange it with the faulty one. This enables Masternaut to complete jobs without using high-end engineers to perform simple swap-outs, and to optimise its stock whilst also outsourcing its engineering.
All stages in any process are tracked and managed by Thinventory™, a unique platform which allows total stock visibility and allows equipment manufacturers to keep track of where and what stage of repair items are at.
Thinventory™, ByBox' end-to-end field service software platform manages the entire process from purchase orders to picking, engineer ordering to delivery, the return/repair loop and customer service to billing. With Thinventory™, all movements can be traced real-time over the web to see what stage of the supply chain a customers' part is at, ensuring 100% visibility of stock at every point in the supply chain.
ByBox wanted to move this 100% visibility on a stage and keep track of its vehicles and so it turned to Masternaut. Masternaut provide ByBox with vehicle tracking across the whole fleet of vehicles. The tracking provides ByBox with full visibility of its vehicles day and night, helping it to monitor delivery and collection routes. Each vehicle is reported on; showing the time the vehicle leaves a Distribution Centre, to the time spent at each site visited, the mileage used and the time the vehicle returns back to the Distribution Centre.
This gives complete visibility of how the vehicle is being used during a 24 hour period. ByBox is also given the option to view the data historically should they need to track any history or look into events that have happened in the past. This also provides a great back up for Proof of Deliveries to show that the vehicle did visit a site at a particular time in question.
ByBox can also use the system to add new customer sites and collections on to its existing routes based on the information that Masternaut provides.
Neil Garbutt, Service Director of Masternaut commented: "The new distribution service utilising the ByBox system has quickly made a positive impact on our customer service capability. We are delighted to have found a cost effective way of meeting our obligations that is totally reliable and secure".
Both companies provide unique services to one another and the partnership is extremely successful. Offering not only a solution to each other but a competitive edge, the partnership ensures both companies stay one step, or should that be one mile ahead of their competitors.