Calderhead Refrigerated Transport Holds High Praise For Camera Solutions in Mitigating Premiums

Established over 30 years ago with just one truck, the business has gone from strength to strength and now has a fleet of 10 trucks, two vans and three cold store facilities as well as working with some of the UK’s most prominent food brands.

After initially seeking out dashcam solutions for its vehicles that also came with live-view functionality, Calderhead sparked a relationship with Midlands-based camera and telematics specialists Centrad.

However, in an attempt to mitigate rising insurance premiums and ensure their vehicles complied with Transport for London’s (TfL) Direct Vision Standard (DVS) in 2019, the temperature-controlled logistics experts looked to broaden the range of cameras solutions across its fleet.

With the company running up to five trucks into Greater London per day, becoming compliant with the incoming changes was imperative to continue operations within the capital.

Fast forward to the present day and Centrad has retrofitted a four camera ‘360’ camera system on each vehicle within Calderhead’s fleet, covering the front, side and rear, as well as the latest technology to ensure full compliance with the new Direct Vision Standard ‘PSS’ scheme including forward and nearside blind spot detection cameras onto the haulier’s trucks over 12 tonnes – which are now compliant until 2030.

Philip Johnson, Commercial Manager at Calderhead said the camera systems have played a vital role in mitigating already heightened insurance premiums for the business by providing clear and irrefutable evidence when disputes arise, while also helping to streamline its fleet management processes.

Philip Johnson commented: “In the last four years, our incident numbers has been relatively low, however the importance of having a comfort blanket in place is imperative, especially with insurance costs still remaining high.

“As a business, if you can tangibly demonstrate that you’re not at fault as opposed to being at fault, the difference in cost is phenomenal. This is largely why we didn’t want to settle for just a forward-facing dashcam solution, as we felt that having 360 coverage on our vehicles was imperative to ensure all angles were captured and clear evidence was readily available in the event an incident occurred.

“So, from an insurance perspective, camera systems are crucial to mitigating premiums, as their footage enables us to act quickly in the event a claim needs to be made. A good rule of thumb is that the quicker you act the cheaper a claim becomes. From our own experience, if an operator is able to notify their insurers within a couple of hours of an incident occurring, then the claims value can actually decrease by up to 50 per cent, namely by enabling them to save a significant amount on unnecessary cost related to claims.”

Aligned with Calderhead’s requirement for a seamless, real-time monitoring solution that avoids the hassle of manual SD card removal for data retrieval, the decision to adopt Centrad’s Live Video Telematics platform, Centrad Live, eliminated this inconvenience entirely by ensuring instant access to live footage whenever needed.

Previously, Calderhead had to access different platforms depending on the truck manufacturer, however with Centrad’s comprehensive platform they can now view and manage all their trucks in one unified place – providing a more efficient and integrated process for overseeing their entire operation.

Philip continued: “Centrad Live has been a lifesaver as it’s completely streamlined our operations by integrating all vehicle data into one unified system, regardless of the truck manufacturer, which previously took up an unnecessary amount of time.

So rather than having to log-in to each individual platform, we’re able to see all our vehicles on one centralised app.

“Centrad in many ways have been crucial to our day-to-day operation. Not only have they helped us as an operator to mitigate premiums, a concern that is shared by all within the industry, but through their cutting-edge technology and consultation they’ve helped us to continue operating within Greater London, which accounts for around 35 per cent of our entire business, and further streamline operations across the board.”