McGill’s Bus Group, Britain’s largest independently-owned bus company, is to roll-out a digital system to manage the maintenance of 700 vehicles. Supplied by Freeway Fleet Systems, engineers are being equipped with rugged mobile devices as part of a move to paperless working at seven maintenance facilities across Scotland.
McGill’s runs local, city, rural and interurban bus and coach services across Scotland and has trebled in size over the past 4 years. Operating under the McGill’s, Midland Bluebird, Xplore Dundee and BrightBus brands, as well as open-top hop on and hop off tours, airport connections, coach touring and private hire, McGills now also operates up to 40 coaches as part of a leading strategic partnership with Flixbus.
‘With the rapid growth of McGill’s Bus Group in recent years, we’d increasingly become overwhelmed with paperwork and our existing workshop system was at best very clunky. We knew we needed to modernise and move to digital working,” says Russell Henderson, Group Engineering Director, McGill’s Bus Group.
We have been considering a number of different systems over the past few years and, with their track record and reputation, Freeway emerged as our selected choice. In particular, we were impressed with the adaptability and extensive functionality of their software.”
McGill’s Bus Group see the integration of systems as crucial for the future and plans are in place to link Freeway with existing fleet, operations and accounts systems; notably EP Morris, Omnibus and Sage.
“We really liked the way Freeway was an open system developed to ease integration with other systems. Ultimately that will give us seamless visibility of the status and performance of the fleet, across multiple locations and across different bus operations,” says Henderson.
McGill’s Bus Group has been at the forefront on the switch to electric and will shortly reach a landmark figure of 8 million electric-only miles.
McGill’s will be equipping engineers with mobile devices, with initial roll-out at their Xplore Dundee business. A Freeway app provides a digital version of paper job cards and inspection sheets and links wirelessly with a central workshop management system.
Freeway will also be used for managing stores and purchasing, and driver walk-around checks are also ‘going digital’ potentially using existing ticket machines that integrate with Freeway.
McGill’s Bus Group also sees great potential in Freeway’s application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). “With a fleet of our size dealing with paperwork still affects our productivity so we’re always looking for ways to reduce medial administrative tasks through automation,” says Henderson.
One of the biggest burdens is the time-consuming task of matching invoices with PO’s. With Freeway’s OCR this matching is automated so we only have to check invoices if there is an anomaly. This automation will significantly streamline the whole process, freeing up staff to do more important work, strengthening the finance team.”
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