Freightliner case study: footage in minutes, not days
For years, getting footage at Freightliner meant waiting for the lorry to come home. Now it takes minutes.
Key facts
Freightliner’s road fleet used to wait days, sometimes weeks, for camera footage, because it sat on a recorder in the cab until the vehicle came back. AES Fleet moved over 200 vehicles to connected MANTIS multi-camera systems. Footage now takes minutes, and insurers get it the same day.
About Freightliner UK Group
Fleet size: Over 200 vehicles
Sites: 10 nationwide
Partners: MANTIS, alongside Webfleet
For years, getting camera footage at Freightliner meant waiting for a lorry to come home.
Emma Wilson is National Training Manager for road at Freightliner UK Group, responsible for the training of the business's class one HGV drivers. When an incident was reported, the footage sat on a recorder in the cab. The cab could be anywhere in the country.
"If the driver was working away Monday to Friday, we couldn't get the truck till Friday," she says. "Sometimes it took us days. Sometimes weeks."
Some drivers left at four on a Monday morning and weren't back until seven on Friday night. Emma was working 14 and 15 hour days, waiting for vehicles. Then came the part that hurt most.
The camera had failed and nobody knew
Freightliner had been with AES Fleet since 2014, starting with Webfleet telematics. Marc Flitton, Head of Sales at AES, saw the same pattern across the old camera system.
"They were having a lot of failures, recorder failures, camera failures, and they wouldn't know about it until after the fact," he says. A camera could be dead for two or three months before anyone found out, and the usual way to find out was an incident.
That is the problem MANTIS was built around. A camera system is only worth having if it is working on the day you need it, and you can only be confident of that if you can see it.
You'd finally get the box out, and there's nothing on it. So I couldn't fight the claim. I couldn't even say we were innocent.
Emma Wilson | Freightliner
Over 200 vehicles, ten sites, no trucks off the road for long
AES moved Freightliner to connected MANTIS multi-camera systems, integrated with the Webfleet telematics already in the vehicles. Today the fleet has over 200 vehicles on MANTIS.
The rollout ran site by site across Freightliner's ten locations. AES took two or three trucks off the road a day and fitted them in Freightliner's own workshops. New vehicles were fitted at the dealer, so they arrived ready to work.
Every system now reports its own health. A daily report goes to Freightliner and to AES's technical team, flagging a faulty camera or a memory problem along with the vehicle's last known location. AES can send an engineer to the right place with the right part before the camera is needed, rather than after.
Footage in minutes, insurers the same day
"As long as you've got the date and time, we can pull it, literally in minutes," Emma says.
The change shows up most with insurers. "We'd have the insurers constantly on to us. Where's my footage? I couldn't give them anything. Now they get it the same day."
The side cameras have earned their place. "I've probably used the side cameras more than the front ones, to be honest," Emma says. For her, a single forward-facing camera is not an answer. "You're not going to get enough of the picture."
Customers have claimed Freightliner damaged their property on delivery. The footage has shown the damage was already there before the truck arrived. "We've been able to fight far more claims, because we've got a clearer picture than we've ever had."
When the driver's memory and the footage disagree
Some of the most useful moments happen in Emma's office, not with an insurer.
A driver will come in certain that the other vehicle drove into them. Emma plays the footage and asks them to say what they see. "And all of a sudden it's, I didn't realise I was that bad. I didn't realise I'd done that."
Where Freightliner's driver was at fault, the footage becomes the training. Emma's team uses it to talk the driver through the moment and work on getting it right next time.
She has also set the system up so each depot only sees its own drivers. When every depot could see every other depot's scores, the ones near the bottom stopped improving because someone else was always lower. Now each depot works on its own.
Brad Read, Channel Partner and Enterprise Account Manager at MANTIS, says the Freightliner team has started using driver risk data in RECON to pick out drivers for training before an incident happens, not just after.
Real people at the end of the phone
Emma deals mainly with Wendy at AES. "She's always on the end of the phone. I make a call, she's there." When she emails MANTIS about a camera, she says, it's dealt with the same day. With the previous provider, a reported issue could go a week or two without a reply.
What she'd tell another fleet manager
Do it. It's saved me so much time, and my team. Before, I was doing 14, 15 hour days because I had to wait for trucks. Now I log on, and two minutes later I've got the footage.
Emma Wilson | Freightliner
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