Ashvale Haulage Ltd is based in Hertfordshire and specialises in Muck Away, Aggregate Deliveries and various other activities across London and the South East. The office is run by a dedicated team of professional personnel who support the transport team.
Richard Callanan, Director, explains how Ashvale Haulage Ltd has achieved significant improvements through FORS (including reductions in fuel use / reduced CO2 emissions, lowered NOx and Particulate Matter emissions, improved its road safety record, decreased transport related fines and charges etc.)’
We were asked to consider FORS in 2015 along with our sister company M O’Brien Plant Hire Ltd. After seeing more and more companies proudly displaying their accreditation we decided in 2016 to go for Bronze. We quickly continued our journey to Silver and Gold in 2018.
The Bronze Audit was a lot more in depth than we expected, but we had invested a lot of staff house ensuring that we followed every inch of the FORS standard. I would point out that the Bronze Audit should be respected and planned for to ensure a pass is achieved.
Once we were Bronze accredited and had fully implemented the compliance, policies and procedures it was a natural step to progress onto Silver. This helped the company to focus more on the safe and efficient running of the fleet. Also this helped us when the time came to register for Direct Vision Standard. All of vehicles were already running at the approved standard. The next step was achieving and maintaining Gold.
After gaining our initial Bronze accreditation we made use of the Driver training that FORS provided, in particular the Safe Urban Driving and Cycle Safety. The drivers commented on how much more aware it made them during their daily tasks. More recent use of the FORS training has allowed our transport managers to become FORS practitioners. This has proved a major benefit to the company in regards to policies and procedures. The e learning classroom courses for the drivers has assisted in monitoring the fuel efficiency of vehicles.
Richard Callanan, Director “Being FORS Gold has provided a selling point when promoting our business”
Jack Dowd, Transport Manager “We have fitted our vehicles with state of the art technology to ensure they are safer, with vulnerable road users in mind”
We straight away spotted the benefits of using the tools within FORS to monitor and maintain fleet data, we then invested heavily in telematics and now have access to the FORS tool kits and or own data allowing us to develop fleet efficiency in the right direction.
Due to our comprehensive inductions and continuing development of our drivers we are easily able to monitor their health and fitness status.- We are fortunate enough to have a good reputation among the driver community and have a very small percentage of staff turnover. We are also in the commanding position to be able to recruit from within the ranks so to speak.
- We have purchased an app to record and monitor our vehicles noise pollution for all our staff dealing with health and safety. Our drivers Health and Wellbeing is at the front of our minds and that of the public too, so we can monitor this effectively moving forward.
- We are always looking for ways to improve the efficiency of our transport operation. Our primary role is within the construction sector and it is very difficult to move loads via any other means other than by road. We used Lo City vehicle finder to see if there are currently any vehicles on the market that can assist us. Unfortunately until the market improves we will have to use the most efficient vehicles we can.
Our plans for the future is to maintain the FORS standard and continue to promote best practise. We have recently updated our fleet with 20 new Scania Euro 6 low entry cabs. This helps to improve direct vision and promote the safety of vulnerable road users. We pride ourselves on having an efficient management team with maintaining strict adherence to manage every aspect of the business, compliance and on-going monitoring of the fleet.
We actively promote FORS to all of our customers and suppliers. We use the FORS gold logo on all of our email signatures, all vehicles have the FORS stickers. Our brochures and
website also advertise that we are Gold FORS members.
To conclude, FORS has supported Ashvale Haulage Ltd to act quickly, efficiently and effectively to implement the correct practises to ensure the fleet continues to operate as safely as possible. We have ensured there is a framework of type that ensures compliance at all levels of the business to be up to date on every aspect of our role in the industry. Essentially we now have access to all the tools such as training courses and E-Learning that would not be available to us without FORS and I doubt we would have seen the benefits without it.