TelMi hardware is being fitted to all new cars supplied by Fleet Hire to salary sacrifice customers through its Car Salary Exchange division as an aid to more efficient scheduling of vehicle servicing.

It will also be retro-fitted to a number of mixed car and van fleets, with the capability to provide a range of management information including mileage capture, fuel usage monitoring, carbon emissions measurement and fuel economy and risk ranking for drivers.

Solihull-based Fleet Hire has built its TelMi offering on the moDrive platform which was launched last year by Ebbon-Dacs in conjunction with motor accessories supplier, vGroup International.

Earlier this year, Fleet Hire took the decision to switch all its vehicle purchasing to Ebbon-Dacs’ e-procurement platform, Leaselink, and the latest move is seen as strengthening the business partnership between the two companies.

Fleet Hire's chief operating officer, Chris Joyce, said there were a number of benefits from the relationship which would make the launch of  as "smooth and efficient as possible".

“The name comes from a combination of ‘telematics’ and ‘management information’ and it’s our intention to provide a multi-layered service with different levels of reporting and management information for our customers, depending on their requirements," he explained.

“Customers can choose from a base level which incorporates mileage capture, fault code recording and service scheduling to more detailed dashboards which provide league tables of the best and worst drivers based on their behaviours and their fuel economy and risk profiles.

“Our salary sacrifice customers will benefit from more efficient service scheduling as we will capture the mileages on their vehicles to ensure that servicing is carried out at the appropriate times, as well as identifying any faults on their vehicles.

“For corporate fleets, there are a number of operational benefits that will help them run their fleets more efficiently. These include features such as mileage and fuel usage capture, carbon emissions reporting, advanced service scheduling and many more," he added.

TelMi will also incorporate a level of real-time vehicle tracking that shows the current and previous positions of vehicles, a feature that is expected to be particularly useful to service engineers using light commercial vehicles. There is also a driver ID facility for situations when multiple drivers use the same vehicle.

The system can also identify start/stop times and locations and allows drivers to tag journeys as business or private and their purpose. This allows reconciliation of business and private mileage for reclamation on a journey by journey basis.