Case study

How City of Boston Took Control

By Ellen Sowerby
18 November 2020

The Boston Central Fleet Management division is using FleetWave to drive ongoing efficiencies and eliminate labor-intensive manual processes.

 

When you have dozens of departments and agencies, and multiple shops across a wide area, standardizing your management systems is essential or you will never gain control of your fleet. That’s what Boston Central Fleet Management did. And it led to big gains in efficiency too.

The Central Fleet Management division of the Public Works Department for the City of Boston maintains 1,100 vehicles for about 20 city departments and several outside municipal agencies. It runs three shops where 32 technicians service and repair a wide range of equipment.

The City of Boston wanted to standardize all of its fleet processes across the organization. Its aim was to gain city wide visibility of all operating costs and fleet utilization, in order to drive efficiencies and eliminate labor-intensive manual processes.

Following a review process, the City of Boston chose our web-based FleetWave application as the critical business tool needed to meet the goals of its Central Fleet Management division.

Our FleetWave software has made parts management seamless for us. We don’t have to be concerned that parts are assigned to work orders and charged to vehicles and user departments correctly. We’re no longer entering data in multiple systems for billing because everything is automatically in the right bucket.

Matt Bradley
Logistics Specialist with the City of Boston

Real-time data management and reporting

Boston brought together a detailed web of fleet-related information in an easy-to-interpret format using the software, and now the management division is able to create immediate reports on real-time data, automate processes and set actionable KPIs.

Boston achieved improvements in a huge variety of areas – however one of the most important features of the software for this organization is its ability to help improve management of the fleet inventory and reduce costs.

Boston handles all of its fleet inventory needs on-site, using a system that sees technicians bring work orders and vehicle information to a parts room where the data is entered into a point-of-sale system. In an important step that is proving to be greatly beneficial for management processes, FleetWave is able to integrate with the point-of-sale system to facilitate automatic charging of parts to work orders.

 

Integrated parts management

Matt Bradley, Logistics Specialist with the City of Boston, Central Fleet Management division, explains the value of this integrated approach to parts management:

“With our fleet management and parts point-of-sale systems fully integrated we are no longer in the parts business. We don’t have to tie up employees for managing and restocking inventory, and we don’t have carrying costs for obsolete items.”

The integration also enables significant savings in workload and administration, he continues:

“After we contracted with an external parts organization to handle our parts needs, we were also able to reassign three people. Two of them became service writers and one is now a technician in our shop.”

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