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PRACTICAL TIPS David Gerrard, workshop manager of specialist minibus hire
Page 56
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firm AMK, based near Liphook in Hampshire, has been using RoadBase Xpress since late last year to help keep tabs on a fleet of over 80 minibuses, as well as to help manage the servicing of around the same number of vehicles again for local care homes and charities.
it's very clear and easy to use, being a Windows-based system," he says. "Our previous package was DOS-based and wasn't that easy to use. This is nice and simple and does everything you need."
Overall, says Gerrard, RoadBase Xpress is a very good tool. The only area where it doesn't quite operate as he'd like is in recognising taxi tests, which the law requires to be interspersed at regular intervals with MoTs for passenger carrying vehicles — one of each per year in the first six years of a vehicle's life and two taxi tests and one MoT per year thereafter. "At the moment, the software can't differentiate between the two types of test, says Gerrard. "It's a bit hit and miss whether it comes up with a taxi test or an MoT."
Chevin is working on a sotu1ion, however, and overall Gerrard is impressed with the software. "It was very good value for money, compared to the other packages we looked at, one of which was in the £3,00014,000 bracket. Overall, I'd give it 8.5 out of 10, If we could get the MoTitaxi-test problem sorted out, I'd be very hard pushed to criticise it," he says.
Specialist training and business consultancy NTP Group, based in Sheffield, has been using RoadBase Xpress since November to manage a fleet of 180 vehicles. Fleet manager Hannah Clerehugh says one of the things she most likes about it is the ease of use. "It's very user-friendly and provided you put the right things in, you can get a lot of different reports back out of it," she says.
"The value for money is excellent, particularly compared to what we had before, which was a lot more expensive and didn't do half the things RoadBase Xpress can." she adds.
Cierehugh gives RoadBase Xpress eight out of 10, but says there are a couple of niggles she'd like to see sorted out. "The software can shut down inexplicably, for instance. It either just freezes or you get an error message and an opportunity to abort what you're trying to do. And if you try to cancel or ignore that, it aborts anyway. It happens quite frequently" Another issue, says Clerehugh, is that the software doesn't currently support Excel spreadsheet data received from the firm's Overdrive fuel card system, though Chevin is working on providing this and a solution is expected soon, she says.