John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing Tracks Its Trailers With Sentinel Fleet View

Client: John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing
Industry: Road Haulage and Warehousing
Product Solutions: Fleet View Telematics, Trailer Trackers

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"Working with Sentinel has been great. The tracking system is the best we've used. Really simple and easy, and it gives us exactly what we need to know where our trailers are."

Lee Montgomery, Fleet Manager, John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing

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About John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing
Established in 1956, John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing is one of the largest family-owned road haulage companies in Scotland. Operating from a fifteen-acre headquarters in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, the business offers general haulage, container movements, bulk freight transport, and warehousing services to customers across the UK.

Today the company operates a large fleet of over 130 trucks and 246 trailers, as well as forklifts and heavy lifting equipment, all maintained and managed in-house. As part of the wider Gregory Group, John Mitchell operates across the length and breadth of the UK, with trailers regularly moving between sites across the country.

Sentinel Systems has been providing John Mitchell with camera systems for a number of years, including integrated recording capabilities and systems that are compliant with the latest Progressive Safe System changes to the Direct Vision Standard, for all vehicles going in and out of London.

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The Need For Better Tracking
With trailers frequently travelling nationwide, keeping track of where they were at any given time had become increasingly difficult. A trailer loaded in Grangemouth might end up down south for days at a time, and without reliable tracking in place, getting eyes on the fleet meant relying on phone calls and manual updates rather than live data.

Lee Montgomery, Fleet Manager at John Mitchell, oversees maintenance and operational management across the truck and trailer fleet. As the business grew and trailers began covering more ground across the group, it became clear to him that a proper tracking solution was needed.

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"They send the trackers up to us already programmed. I send over the details, and they load everything onto the system. It really is that simple."

Lee Montgomery, Fleet Manager, John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing

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Getting The Fleet Connected
John Mitchell chose Sentinel's FleetView telematics platform to give the business visibility of its trailer fleet. The rollout began with curtainsider trailers, with Sentinel supplying pre-programmed trackers ready to fit. It was a very straightforward onboarding, with Lee and his team sending through the vehicle details, Sentinel loading them onto John Mitchell’s dedicated Fleet View account, and the trackers then going live immediately.

The simplicity of the setup process was important for a fleet operation of this size. With so many trucks and trailers in use and travelling nationwide, the last thing the team needed was a complicated process or time spent on configuration when vehicles need to be out on the road.

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The Results
The rollout has gone well from day one. With FleetView now active across the curtainsider fleet, the team has the visibility it needed to keep track of trailers as they move around the country.

Because of the success of the partnership, the plan is to extend tracking across more of the fleet. For a business operating at this scale, having reliable, easy-to-use trailer visibility is only going to become more important as their operations grow.