Barloworld Handling says it has spent millions to improve its service delivery for its growing UK customer base.

"Over the last four years, Barloworld has made [multi-million] investments in IT software, hardware and systems to ensure customers receive the best level of service through the latest technology," says a company spokesperson, who declines to specify the total investment.

The Hyster forklift distributor now has an SAP-based service management system integrated with all its engineers' mobile palmtop systems. (SAP is a leading business software company headquartered in Walldorf, Germany.)

The GPRS-enabled palmtops give technicians real-time access to their service diary, fleet history, full parts schematics and allows them to check parts availability and order online.

Alan Dunne, national service manager, says wider and quicker access to information benefits customers through reduced errors and the maximisation of its "first time fix capability".

Barloworld's national service centre in Abingdon has been expanded to handle service calls from customers with national fleets. The centralised hub logs all calls and maintains a history of events to allow efficient resolution of service-related issues.

During the past six months, Barloworld invested GBP1 million (USD2.0 million) in a web-based vehicle tracking system for its 550 service vehicles. With live tracking over the web, dispatchers can easily assign calls to the nearest engineers and optimise route and schedule planning.

"Since we started equipping our vehicles with the tracker, the benefits have become evident very quickly," says Dunne.

"This was illustrated during the recent floods which badly affected UK industry. With live tracking over the web, our dispatchers were able to guide our engineers and find the quickest route to the next service call."

Barloworld has over 600 engineers in the UK, 520 of them field-based. Its in-house technical training team provides about 7,000 man days of training a year. The company also offers four-year engineering apprenticeships at colleges and its own training centres in the UK. It currently has 20 apprentices.

Barloworld claims to be the world's largest independent forklift distributor with operations in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa and the US.

As UK's exclusive Hyster distributor, it maintains almost 30,000 forklifts in the country.