How Fleetonomics helped provide clarity to Wellington Free Ambulance
Wellington Free Ambulance is the only emergency ambulance service in Wellington and the Wairarapa, and the only free ambulance service in New Zealand.
“..the most controllable variable to optimise the use of our existing critical assets...”
The challenge
To keep doing the great work it does, Wellington Free Ambulance (WFA) needed a 10-year fleet strategy across all service lines – emergency response, patient transfer services, search and rescue, events and general use vehicles.
Unfortunately, they had no way of deciphering how many vehicles they actually needed given changes in their workforce or what spare fleet capacity they needed to ensure a fully responsive operation. This meant asset acquisition decisions were being made without an asset disposal strategy resulting in a growing fleet.
Solution
Fleetonomics conducted a strategic fleet management review across their full fleet, including saloons, SUVs, utes, vans and of course, ambulances. For emergency response vehicles, the analysis was extended to a 24/7/365 profile to reflect the utilisation needs of those vehicles.
Building in predictability
We provided ten recommendations to progress WFA to a more predictable fleet management state. Operational and supply chain efficiencies built a robust business plan and identified overcapacity in the fleet of 12%, representing a saving of $1.1m.
Getting vehicles back on the road sooner
Our analysis also identified an issue with the time it took to get vehicles back on the road after maintenance and provided a solution to improve vehicle uptime.
Wellington Free Ambulance’s Eric Tibbott, General Manager, Operations says:
“The GPS deep dive analysis enabled us to clearly understand how many vehicles were needed to run current operations, and to map this to our fluctuating resource levels and in doing so, develop the 10-year asset replacement strategy. In addition, we identified an opportunity to improve how quickly vehicles are returned to service after maintenance and this has enabled us to improve our workshop performance. Addressing this has been the most controllable variable to optimise the use of our existing critical assets.”