Kraftwerke Oberhasli AG (KWO) is one of Switzerland's leading hydropower companies. It produces between 2,100 and 2,300 gigawatt hours of electrical energy annually. Since 2021, KWO has been using autoSense's cost-efficient and cost-efficient fleet solution to manage its approximately thirty pool vehicles.
Starting position
Since its founding in 1925, KWO has efficiently produced electricity from renewable energy sources for hundreds of thousands of people in Switzerland and abroad. With 13 hydroelectric plants and 8 reservoirs, the KWO Grimsel Power division produces between 2,100 and 2,300 gigawatt hours of electrical energy annually.
At its headquarters in Innertkirchen in the canton of Bern, KWO operates a fleet of around 90 road vehicles. Of these, around 30 passenger cars and light commercial vehicles are used as pool and department vehicles, which can be used by various employees as required.
Until now, the mileage was manually recorded by drivers in a paper logbook and then read out and recorded manually in the finance department in order to finally allocate the resulting travel costs to the corresponding project or department cost center. This type of cost allocation was sometimes incomplete, not always with the expected accuracy and consumed an unnecessarily large number of resources. Those responsible therefore sought a solution from KWO.
Solution and procedure
Mileage recording and internal billing should be simplified as far as possible, improved in quality and digitized. On the same train, an efficient fleet analysis of the entire fleet should provide insights into any optimization potential.
Thanks to its own fleet solution “fleetPro”, autoSense was able to offer a solution based on three pillars and implement it for KWO as follows:
Completely digitalized pool car management:
- Replaces Outlook reservations and paper logbook
- The trips are systematically and therefore completely recorded and, in the final solution, directly transmitted to the financial accounting systems with information on the driver, project/cost center number and other useful information
Fleet management/ utilization monitoring:
- Provides important evaluations to optimize fleet composition and use in the future based on facts
eMobility analysis:
- Based on the data collected by fleetPro in 2021, the KWO management was able to prepare a comprehensive mobility analysis in cooperation with partner BKW so that the right decisions could also be made when switching to alternative drives — an obvious concern, especially for KWO as an energy supplier.
Implementation
autoSense solution. From the outset, the concerns were precisely recorded and implemented both by the project team and by the employees involved, which also enabled the effective solution to be continuously developed and optimized. In the beginning, these changes were received by users to varying degrees. With patience, communication and persuasion, the conversion from paper to smartphones was finally carried out well by users who were less tech-savvy.
“Thanks to regular and well-coordinated reconciliations, the latest special solutions have now also been successfully implemented,”
Werner Häcki, Head of Transport and Railways at KWO, remembers.
“The collaboration with autoSense was highly professional, focused and effective throughout the project phase. The experience has helped us with this,”
Häcki says at the end.
