UK Transport Firm Boosts Quotation Offering via New App

A UK transport firm has created a quotation tool from an innovative location-finder app, known as What3words.

“You can tell your pals exactly where you have pitched your tent at Glastonbury. You can tell the emergency services exactly where you are if lost in a forest or up a mountain. And when thinking logistics you can let your haulier know exactly where to place that delivery on your new construction site (which doesn’t have a road name yet),” says Damian Pulford, MD, Sussex Transport Limited.

What3words has divided the world into three-metre squares and has subsequently given each square a unique three word code which lets anyone provide an exact location by using these three words.

Sussex Transport operates a fleet of lorry loader, hiab and crane vehicles, as well as Moffett mounted forklift trucks which are continually lifting items from and onto sites across the UK. Sussex Transport also provide Storage and Shipping Container hire and sales through ST Containers. And with so many large items being moved on and off site on a daily basis Damian and his marketing team set about digging into the What3Words API to develop a tool to help the company and its customers.

“Of course you can use Google maps, plenty of phone calls, interpretations and annotations. You get drawings and mockups, and instructions like ‘just over that wall’. But that can and does lead to confusion, especially as the instructions often filter through multiple contacts before the driver finally gets to the destination,” he says.

The team at Sussex Transport have since created and launched a web-based quoting tool that allows their customers and prospects to run through a quote request and at the same time precisely advise the planning team of collection and delivery locations as well as upload additional images and files.

This gives the clients, internal lifting and internal planning teams matching information and exact locations that can be seen and agreed by all before the job takes place.

“Removing many of the risks associated with locations on certain sites coupled with the more accurate delivery point data has massively helped streamline the process. Some of our regular clients now don’t even need to be onsite when we deliver. They know we’ll be placing the units in the right place. Technology is so important to us and something we enjoy developing and investing in,” confirms Operations Director Nic Pulford.