Avis – Case study

Highly Customised Mobile Solution for Driver

Business objective
Avis UK is the fastest growing car rental company in the UK with over 340 car rental locations across the UK.

To make the car rental experience more convenient for their customers, Avis UK also provides an enhanced rental car delivery and collection service, called Avis Delivers, allowing customers to have their rental cars delivered to and collected from their home or any other address. The Avis UK delivery and collection network involves:

• 20,000 vehicles;
• 120 rental locations;
• 700+ drivers;
• 4,000 rentals per day.

To ensure full control of their fleet on delivery and collection assignments and enable end-to-end visibility of their fleet operations, Avis UK made a decision to equip these vehicles with a reliable and cost effective driver PDA application that would support their specific operational workflows, enabling on-time delivery of rental cars to customers, collection of vehicles by Avis drivers, and also provide GPS tracking functionality for such operations.

Customer challegne
Before the decision to roll out Magenta’s driver PDA application was made, Avis UK had previous experience of working with another solution provided by one of the standardised product vendors. Instead the solution delivered Avis and their drivers a number of issues that seriously affected their operational efficiency. Some of these issues included:

• the system did not make provision for any other applications to be installed and run on the PDA device – taking up all available memory and preventing drivers from having and using any other software tools relevant for their job;
• the inability to share the device with other applications meant that no GPS Tracking could be performed by the same device, forcing Avis to invest in additional technology and hardware;
• when connectivity was lost, the application was unable to automatically re-connect to the network, requiring the driver to logout and then login again to re-establish the connection every time the problem occurred;
• the poor quality user experience provided by the application and small input buttons caused drivers to make mistakes while processing the job on their PDA. As it was provided by a standard product company, the solution had limited customisation scope with no option to change the user interface to adjust to Avis UK’s needs.

These challenging operational issues made Avis UK re-consider the vendor and their approach to the solution, and shaped their view to streamline operations and achieve maximum efficiency for minimum investment. Magenta as Avis’ existing long-term technology partner, was asked to come up with a new solution that would closely meet the requirements of their quickly growing business.

Magenta’s solution
Magenta worked closely with Avis UK’s Operations team to configure our driver PDA application, and implemented a new highly customised mobile solution for their fleet on delivery and collection assignments that:

• fully supports Avis’ specific business process, work and data flows based on their operational demands, enabling communication of details of jobs allocated to drivers, job statuses, and vehicle check details like mileage and fuel readings;
• enables other operationally essential functionality including image capture of car damage that is linked to the rental car with a view to streamline and facilitate damage claim processing;
• includes passive GPS Tracking with the tracking data sent directly from the driver’s mobile devices to the Dispatch and Tracking solution. This function has proved to be ideal for Avis rental cars where fitting of permanent black box GPS tracking devices is not feasible, and allows them to use historical and real-time vehicle tracking data, routes and other management information for operations performed on cars between the rentals;
• features seamless integration with Avis’s preferred navigation and routing solutions;
• supports over-the-air updates with no need to buy and install any 3rd party applications to enable the process. The update process only requires parts of the solution to be updated in order to save Avis field staff time and data traffic, and minimise disruptions to operations;
• has a user interface that has proven to be convenient and easy to use by all users of all abilities;
• is less expensive to operate thereby delivering bottom line benefits.

The driver PDA application implemented by Magenta is seamlessly integrated with and currently working as a part of the Wizmap Dispatch and Tracking solution also delivered to Avis UK by Magenta based on our Mobile Workforce Management Solution.

Customer results
Having switched from the previous mobile device client to Magenta’s PDA application, Avis was able to achieve:

• significant savings by implementing a more cost effective application than Magenta’s competitors;
• full fleet visibility and transparency of the activities of the vehicles between rentals via comprehensive reporting on driver’s current location, historical positioning at specific times and the route they took;
• improved customer service levels via the ability to track drivers’ and stations’ performance and ensure on-time rental car deliveries;
• better and more efficient communications between operations and drivers;
• considerably fewer human errors in processing jobs and improved satisfaction on the drivers’ side.