Bingham takes wheel as Fleetmatics launches expansion drive

Peter Bingham, from Harrogate, believes SageQuest is well-placed to pick up big-name clients in Yorkshire that want to manage their vehicle fleets more efficiently. His appointment follows the announcement that Fleetmatics, a multi-national group that provides fleet management systems, has decided to launch SageQuest in the UK.

SageQuest, which has been designed for fleets with more than 100 vehicles, helps businesses to monitor the location and performance of company cars and vans.

It can help to improve a company’s performance by, for example, identifying times when vehicles are idle.

Mr Bingham has lived in Harrogate since 1985 and has worked in the telematics industry for 14 years.

He previously worked as corporate sales director at Leeds-based Minorplanet, which was bought by Digicore in 2010 and is now called Ctrack.

Mr Bingham said: “Fleetmatics, which has its head office in Dublin, floated on the New York Stock Exchange five weeks ago, generating more than $93m.

“The company bought Sage-Quest three years ago. We want to build on our success in the US, where we’ve got some of the biggest fleets in the world on our books.

“Telematics has been around since the 1980s, but it really started to take off in the 1990s.

“With the introduction of second-generation systems, we can substantially improve companies’ fleet and workforce running costs.

“The head office is in Reading and there are 120 staff in the UK and Ireland.”

Mr Bingham added: “We are hopefully about to announce that we’ve signed a few big household names in the UK.

“I feel that here’s great potential in this marketplace for Sage-Quest. There are more than four million commercial vehicles in the UK market, and the penetration is under 24 per cent for telematics.”

The recession has made companies think carefully about managing costs, according to Mr Bingham.

He added: “The last two years have been the busiest ever for the telematics businesses.

“Companies are looking very carefully at their fuel and staffing levels, and people are wanting to concentrate on their mobile assets.

“If you’ve got 250 people on the ground, you need to know where they are.

“Yorkshire is a big county for the telematics industry. A lot of big service-based industries are based there, who are our archetypal clients.”

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