Swissport holds the accolade of being the first customer for Aires at Gatwick – and that step was taken back in September 2004. David Rivers is Station Manager there. “The key attraction for me was having the one facility,” he reports. “There was no need for individual contracts and it was a point-to-point service. Safety was another thing, because we didn’t have to get involved in fuel storage and associated regulations. Chip technology allows for a trouble-free refuelling process. The cost is obviously a benefit, too, and it’s possible to make a direct comparison between this facility and our suppliers before. The monitoring is easy, the breakdown per vehicle figures are available on a weekly basis – and there’s flexibility, which is important if we take on extra work.

Altogether, we have 106 vehicles fitted out with this technology, and although the price of diesel has risen over the last 24 months (Paul calculates that the cost has gone up by 120%), we’ve made savings of around 5% on our average fuel usage. For our purposes, we have just one piece of paper generated, since the system is effectively paperless. We like the control that we have and the efficiencies the system brings. Fitting out the fleet was straightforward, too.

You’re looking at half an hour to three quarters of an hour to drive to the farm, refuel and get back and you can’t afford to run out of diesel during a turnaround. Anyhow, once we’d started using the Aires technology, these problems vanished overnight. “There is a cost in all this and we pay slightly more overall now than we did before — but the benefits compensate for that. There’s no manpower involved (we get tanks filled up every other day); there’s no wasted mileage and time getting to the fuel farm; fills are guaranteed; the fuel price is competitive; the supply chain is reduced and the volume already here means that we can benefit, even with just a few vehicles. The whole thing is scalable, too: if we were to put more vehicles into the mix — which we’d like to do — then we’d expect a better rate.”

There were mix-ups with fuel cards, tags were lost and so on, and the whole process was not very efficient. “Aires solved all that for us. We now get monthly data that is tailor-made and we can check on under-utilised buses, whether too much idling is occurring, and so on. The benefits are immeasurable as we have no more dead mileage and we’ve saved time and effort. I reckon that we are better off by around 91,000 litres a year in fuel alone. “I believe that our cargo division side is now looking at this solution for Heathrow. Really, the more that we can concentrate on our main business and let others look after the non-core activities, the better it is for us.”