Greenhous completes 6,000-car High Ercall fleet centre

The group, which employs more than 1,000 staff across its retail, fleet and refurbishment operations, took on the former Angel Centre at High Ercall, which had stood empty after its former use as an RAF training base.

Originally used by the air force during the war, in the 1960s it became a training centre for the haulage industry.

Now it has officially opened as a fleet operations centre for Shropshire's biggest privately-owned business, which was named in 54th place in the Sunday Times' list of Britain's private companies with the largest sales.

The centre offers vehicle storage for more than 6,000 cars and commercial vehicles.

Greenhous has its own software development team which has worked with fuel management company Octane to build a system logging all movements of, and actions on, each of the vehicles so that a live feed of data can be viewed of any vehicle on site.

Fleet operations director Kevin Swinnerton said: “We are delighted with the interest we have generated in the industry. We are an innovative company and have invested in, and implemented, several bespoke software solutions that have been developed by our team and these are industry leading solutions.

“Greenhous has invested in this Fleet Operations Centre with a view to becoming market leaders and offering our clients a bespoke solution to their transport needs. There is demand for the flexible approach we offer to the industry. The success of the centre in the first months of its operation has exceeded our expectations.

“We have had many approaches and visits from rental, fleet contract hire and corporate businesses. My team will offer a warm welcome here at Greenhous Village.”

Each vehicle is electronically identified and tagged so it can be found on site through a GPS tracking system.

Vehicles are placed and collected from dedicated zones across the site. The new software solution includes fuel telematics of the journey for that vehicle and the automatic dispensing of an accurate amount of fuel avoiding over fuelling and the allied costs that this has caused to the company in the past. We also offer a fuel de-bowsing facility for de-fleeted stock.

A bespoke Fleet Management System has also been developed which has a portal system for customers to log into enabling them to track vehicles from the point of order to delivery.