CEO's Blog - BigChange joins 1-Fleet Alliance operating in 19 countries throughout Europe with a joint subscriber base of 400,000 connected vehicles

1-Fleet Alliance continues its strong momentum in 2016, launching its new Alliance website and integrating 5 new companies one of which is BigChange. The Alliance now consists of 16 members, and a combined total of more than 400 thousand connected vehicles.

The new website – www.1-fleet.com – is part of the Alliance’s campaign to introduce our philosophy and strategy for the telemetry industry.
The Alliance feel that their distinct advantage is having a pan European reach combined with local know how in each market and this offers a unique value proposition to their local and international customers. The combination of each member’s expertise in their home market, with the European scale of the Alliance, enables the delivery of the most innovative solutions with the highest quality standards for European fleets.

The 1-Fleet Alliance has enlarged its European footprint, adding 5 new members from Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands and Hungary. The current 16 member companies now boasts direct presence in 19 European Union countries, which represent 93% of the 14 trillion euros EU economy. All together the 1-Fleet Al1liance has a sales network with more than 150 salespeople and an installation network of more than 1500 professional installation engineers across Europe.
The new Alliance members are:

Arealcontrol from Germany – arealcontrol.de
BigChange from the UK – bigchangeapps.com
Emixis from Belgium – emixis.com
iData from Hungary – itrack.hu
Inmatix from Netherlands – inmatix.com

1-Fleet Alliance gives a warm welcome to these new members who underpin the 1 Fleet Alliance values: trust, integrity and excellence. These members’ will add significant value to the Alliance’s primary goal of developing the telematics industry ecosystem, through a coopetition strategy.
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About 1-Fleet Alliance:
1-Fleet Alliance is a European association that represents key industry players in the Telematics Fleet Management Solutions industry. The alliance’s primary aim is to create a collaborative environment where the knowledge sharing will conduce to innovation promotion, economies of scale generation and the development of the TFMS industry ecosystem. www.1-fleet.com
About Arealcontrol:

Founded in January 2004, AREALCONTROL GmbH provides Telematics Systems, complete cloud and hybrid solutions for enterprise mobility, fleet and work force management. AREALCONTROL’s goals are fully integrated solutions and applications based on telematics for transport, logistics, sales and service companies.
www.arealcontrol.de

About BigChange:
BigChange by name, BigChange by nature! BigChange is an established force in mobile workforce management and telematics, offering a system that transforms the way companies manage their mobile operations. By challenging convention and through breakthrough innovation, BigChange is pioneering new intuitive and simple to use technology that delivers industry leading levels of return on investment.
www.bigchangeapps.com

About Emixis:
Emixis develops and commercializes innovative hardware and software solutions to help companies manage vehicles, moving assets and field service forces. Our solutions, available in the form of SaaS, are sold in Europe and Africa via a network of resellers and systems integrators.
www.emixis.com/en

About iData:
iData is a hungarian Fleet Management Systems company that was founded in 2005. The founders are all engineers and keen on technology. iData managed to disrupt the market with it’s very early innovation in fuel management and rapid customization technologies. en. itrack.hu

About INmatix:
INmatix Technology Group is a fast growing European Telematics Service Provider (TSP). We operate a flexible high-end telematics infrastructure for communication with remote objects like vehicles, trucks, trailers and machinery.
www.emixis.com

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

BigChange JobWatch is the All-In-One Mobile Workforce Management Solution. One Single platform brings together your back office, mobile workers & customers in perfect harmony.

The BigChange JobWatch system lets organisations eliminate paper letting them efficiently plan, manage, schedule and track their mobile workforce.

BigChange has worked closely with Google Maps over the last three years, they found the team highly Professional, Knowledgeable and Skilled. BigChange is committed to Google Maps for the long term and have renewed their contract which will see the base grow in the United Kingdom alone to over 50,000 subscribers by 2020.

Johann Levy Chief Technology Officer of BigChange and one of the world’s leading developers in Geographical based systems commented “After previously working with Microsoft MapPoint I can honestly say that the Google Maps platform has been transformational and the support has surpassed my expectation. We deal with humans at Google Maps not a website so we can interact with the team in respect of the new features, functionality and influence the product road map.”

The BigChange JobWatch System utilises Google Maps technology in many different ways from

Visualising customer data, locating vehicles, resources, stock, equipment, POI, territories and displaying the data on 4 different map options Road, Aerial, Ordinance Survey and Street views enabling better decisions to be made
CRM uses Address Auto-Completion for Business and POI Search to look up the Company Name, Address and or Post Code
The scheduling of jobs happens dynamically using Predictive Travel Time calculating the travel to and from destinations
Locate the nearest vehicle or resource to a location helps determine who can complete a collection or a reactive service call
Routing offers you options to choose the best route to take and traffic is highlighted on major roads with colour-coding to reflect the current volume of traffic in real time
Customers receive real time Estimated Times of Arrival using Real – Time Traffic
Martin Port Chief Executive Officer of BigChange commented “Google Maps has really helped our company deliver a collaborative unique solution that is enabling Small, Medium and Large organisations benefit driving improved customer service, productivity gains and reduced accidents due excellent driver behaviour. Google Maps really impacts positively in so many ways and along with fantastic Enterprise Support 24 hours a day what more could you want from your Mapping partner”.

BigChange plans to integrate Google Apps into the JobWatch system this will give all companies a complete End to End Apps that will enable voice communication, email and document management working in synchronisation with BigChange JobWatch.

www.bigchangeapps.com

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

The winner of hit television show The Apprentice is teaming up with a Yorkshire-based technology firm to help give his business a boost.

Joseph Valente, who was crowned winner of The Apprentice in 2015, has chosen Leeds-based BigChange’s Mobile Workforce Management platform JobWatch to accelerate the growth of Impra-Gas, the plumbing business he owns along with Lord Sugar.

The paperless app-based JobWatch system will allow Mr Valente’s management team to manage the entire operation from quotation all the way through to invoice, with integrated planning, management, job scheduling and real-time vehicle and resource tracking. Martin Port, founder and CEO of BigChange, said: “BigChange exists to help ambitious businesses like Impra-Gas scale quickly, giving them everything they need to run a dynamic, profitable and customer focused operation.

“We’re really excited to have Joseph on board as a customer.” Last year, serial entrepreneur Martin Port invested in new office space to accommodate the growth of BigChange. The firm took a five-year lease at Temple Point Business Park in Colton, east Leeds. Alex Epstein, who has also featured in the BBC series, re-joined Mr Port at his latest venture BigChange.

Job Watch is aimed at automating business processes to help save time. BigChange teamed up with SmartWitness in-vehicle CCTV cameras to add video functionality to its system.

Mr Port has a track record in the telematics sector. He sold his previous venture, Masternaut UK, for an estimated £20m in 2009.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO