JD Commercials LTD of Stoke On Trent has been operating for over 27 years. We originally operated a Vehicle repair centre and then embarked onto road haulage. We recently closed the vehicle repair centre to focus on our road haulage operation whilst keeping the commercial garage to maintain our own vehicles.
I, Darren Shaw, Transport Manager, will explain the changes we have made and the benefits of being a FORS member and how it has helped us improve fuel use, reduce our emissions, improve our Driver’s knowledge on road safety and reduce accidents and incidents.
We have been a FORS accredited operator for 6 years, we have benefited greatly by this and have completely changed the way our company works.
JD Commercials passed the initial Bronze audit in 2015 we knew straight away that FORS is something we wanted to pursue so that our company, fleet and drivers were to the highest economic and safest standard they could be.
We didn’t want to stop there, as soon as we passed Bronze we wanted to progress onto Silver, as mentioned above we could see such a big improvement in the way our company was working we knew that moving forwards to Silver and eventually Gold would be the best decision for the company. We were also receiving great feedback from sites we were delivering to, customers and our drivers about the changes we were making and standards we were setting.
After achieving our Bronze accreditation, we used the tools FORS provide to enhance our own policies and procedures. This meant our fleet and drivers were working safer and more productive than before.
“We have watched over the years our fleet and drivers become the best they can be, and it really doesn’t get much better than that.” – David Titterton Managing Director.
Our FORS Practioner has completed the workshops again, this course is a great help for any company who want to embrace FORS.
“Sitting the FORS Practioner course gave me a very good insight into the struggles drivers and cyclists face daily. It has also given me lots of motivation to ensure all of our drivers sit the correct programmes/courses so that driving in London becomes easier and safer for all.” Emma Titterton – FORS Practioner.
- Our MPG figures have not improved over the last two years. We have put this down to two reasons:
- Covid-this period of lockdown and reduced workload has meant vehicles were only used as required and for fleets of our size these changes showed big differences.
- Reduction in work for smaller vehicles. As the figures supplied were cross fleet the large vehicles MPG were more dominant.
| MPG | Incidents per 100,000 Kms | Number of PCNs | |
| October 2019 – October 2020 | 12.57 | 0.39 | 7 |
| October 2020 – October 2021 | 13.82 | 0.25 | 11 |
| Percentage improvement | -9.94% | 33.33% | -57% |
Our PCN’S have been greatly reduced since the previous case study, especially in London. However, as shown above PCN’s have increased slightly, this more than likely due to COVID in the previous year and lockdown. Driver training and toolbox talks have helped at delivery points, driver error PCN’S are now at a minimum.- Although recruitment has been tough in the Haulage sector we have embraced what Indeed had to offer and have used this as our main platform. We still use Facebook and utilise driver networks but Indeed is where we get the majority of the results.
- Changing driver habits has been something we have embraced throughout our membership. We still issue our noise reduction policy each year and version date this with our policies handbook. Monitoring idling and harsh movements is done continuously.
- Since our last case study we are always looking into other forms of groupage and the possibility of multi modal. Unfortunately our market sector would not be suitable as we specialise in self offload with cranes and moffetts.
Looking to our “FORS Gold” future we plan to continue investing in our fleet and staff. All of our fleet bar 1 vehicle is Euro 6, our next step will be to ensure we have a full Euro 6 fleet performing to their best ability in regard to emissions and fuel efficiency. We already provide on-going, year-round training which has proved to be worthwhile so it is definitely something we will continue.
Promoting FORS is something that we have always done as we are proud to be part of the organisation. We ensure all vehicles have the correct FORS stickers, promote FORS in our office staffs email “footers”, keep all of our drivers clued up on what direction we are taking with FORS and take time to speak to our customers so that they are aware we are FORS gold and how we can help them.
Maintaining our Gold Accreditation shows our dedication to making a change within the industry. We as a company want to be a part of improving the safety of ALL road users not just in London but nationally, committing to making our vehicles as economic as possible and that our drivers are trained to the highest standard.
We are currently in the process of building our new website but we do have an active Facebook page which we aim to improve over the coming months.