Celebrating 10 Years of Vehocheck

It’s hard to believe, but Vehocheck is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this week! We started Vehocheck with the mission of making the daily walkaround checks easier, more reliable and compliant for Transport Managers and operators.

Over the past decade, Vehocheck has grown with a wide variety of features, including PMI inspections, digital job cards, cost analysis, and more. Vehocheck has come a long way over the last 10 years, but we still remain committed to our original mission.

Vehocheck’s history is marked by consistent growth, customer satisfaction, and a commitment to excellence. We are so proud that Vehocheck continues to make strides in vehicle compliance while also providing industry-leading customer service; it truly makes us feel good about what we do!

In the early days, we had a different software offering.  We were pitching it in the boardroom of a big haulier when the transport manager stopped me mid-flow and said, words to the effect of, “Thank you, love the software, but my real issue is the vehicle inspection paperwork that is taking up a third of the space in one of my warehouses.  If you can work out a way to solve that with an ‘app’, come back and see me.”  So, we did.  12 months later, we pitched Vehocheck and the company became our first customer.

Right at the beginning we were sharing an office with a friend who ran a freight forwarding company.  I had a desk in the corner of the room and would sit coding all day.  It took about 12 months to build the first version of the Vehocheck app and dashboard.  Around a year later it was clear, as the business began to take off, we needed to find our own space and we moved into an office in the Bridge Innovation Centre on the Pembrokeshire Science & Technology Park.

A lot of the conversations at the beginning was around driver adoption.  There was quite a common misconception that drivers wouldn’t have the “technical ability” or the willingness to use the technology.  We understood this very early on, so it was fundamental that the technology was intuitive to use, but also, we were in a time when social media had been well established.  Technology in the palm of your hand was common.  Drivers took to using the app without any issues at all.

We’ve saved a few O-Licences, that’s for sure.  One of our first customers came to us after the Transport Commissioner had given them a period to improve their compliance process.  We were able to quickly embed Vehocheck into the organisation’s process and at the subsequent inspection, the transport manager was praised at the depth of insight he was able to offer.

Fundamentally though, I think that “successes” for us is happy customers.  We have a great relationship with them, and I think that customer relations are very, very important.  All our customers have found a return in their investment in the technology, especially those that use our cost analysis tools to identify where the financial pressures are on their maintenance processes.

We are always looking to grow as a company, so increased market share is important, but also, we are conscious that we need to keep improving what we do.  We are continually developing Vehocheck and the driving force for this are the ideas and feedback we get from our customers. We currently have a few complementary products in R & D at the moment, which we hope we will be able to include with Vehocheck as a value-added service.

Localisation is a big thing for us right now and will be key over the next few years.  We currently have customers across Europe and South Africa, so being able to deliver our technology that is localised to those markets will be very important for our growth.