Field Services

Lanes Group reduces vehicle idling by 83% and saves £155K in fuel costs with Samsara

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Meet Lanes Group

2,200+ EMPLOYEES

5 SUBSIDIARY COMPANIES

4,000+ VEHICLES

The Challenge

Turning fleet data into environmental action

Lanes Group is one of the UK's leading wastewater and drainage specialists, running more than 4,000 vehicles across the country to keep drainage infrastructure working. With 98% of the company's total energy consumption tied directly to how those vehicles are driven, the fleet is where environmental impact is made or wasted.

Fuel consumption was tallied once a year from fuel cards and depot tanks — a single output figure that said how much had been used and nothing about where, why, or what could be done differently. Idling across the HGV fleet was burning fuel and pushing emissions into urban areas at unknown scale, but without real-time visibility there was no mechanism to address it. Meanwhile, paper-based processes across the business were slow, hard to audit, and generating waste that nobody had thought to measure.

The goal was a sustainability programme that could hold up to board and investor scrutiny. That required information the business didn't yet have.

We had data but no insight into what we could actually do with it. Without Samsara's ability to surface the inefficiencies, it would have been very hard to build the business case for change.

Nicola Martin

Head of ESG

The Solution

A single platform for a comprehensive ESG strategy

Samsara is now deployed across all five of Lanes Group's subsidiary companies, with over 4,300 drivers and close to 1,000 users on the platform, spanning operations, health and safety, mechanics, customer excellence, and payroll. What started as fleet tracking is now the data backbone of the group's ESG strategy, formally launched as "Resilient by Nature" and aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Vehicle Telematics

Pinpointing where to preserve fuel

Vehicle idling in the HGV fleet was one of Lanes Group's largest sources of avoidable fuel waste and air pollution. The problem was invisible until Samsara's Idling Reports put a number on it: 12% idle time across targeted vehicles, equating to thousands of gallons of fuel wasted every month.

With that baseline established, the team launched the "Fuel Down the Drain" idling reduction campaign. In-cab audio alerts notified drivers in real time when unproductive idling was detected, the Driver App gave drivers continuous visibility of their own performance, and Samsara's Recognition page celebrated drivers who hit reduction milestones.

Lanes Group's initial ESG target was a 50% reduction in unproductive idling. The company surpassed that goal within four months, as idling fell from 12% to 2%. More than 22,000 gallons of fuel were saved, generating an estimated £155,780 in cost savings and eliminating 260 tonnes CO2e of carbon emissions.

Driver in bright orange safety jacket looking out from a pink Lanes Group plc service vehicle.

Connected Workflows

An efficiency programme with environmental dividends

Lanes Group runs more than 140 active form templates on Samsara, covering site safety audits, vehicle incident forms, drug and alcohol testing, wellbeing checks, payroll clocking, fuel card issues, and asset installation records. Combined with digital vehicle walkarounds completed daily by drivers, the platform now processes over 1.3 million submissions per year, entirely paper-free.

All this digitisation equates to at least 11.7 tonnes of paper eliminated annually — around 325 trees — alongside £145,000 in printing and paper costs removed from the business and 17.5 tonnes of CO2e saved. Initially an operational decision, the initiative has now become a formal metric in Lanes Group's ESG reporting.

Fleet electrification & reporting

Tracking the transition to a greener fleet

Alongside the idling campaign, Lanes Group uses Samsara's custom vehicle attributes to track and report on fleet composition in a way that feeds directly into ESG governance. Every vehicle is tagged with fuel type, euro rating, vehicle type, and cost centre. That data then flows into ESG board packs and science-based target tracking for a current picture of fleet composition rather than an annual estimate. Thanks to this granular level of insight, 100% of the company car fleet has transitioned to hybrid or electric with 28% running on full electric.

For the heavier operational fleet — where zero-emission alternatives are not yet viable — Lanes Group is running an HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) trial through its subsidiary AQS Environmental Solutions. Within the trial period, the switch to HVO at AQS generated a carbon saving of over 1,300 tonnes of CO2e. Samsara vehicle and fuel data works identically with HVO as with diesel, so the environmental gains are tracked with the same accuracy.

The Road Ahead with Samsara

A future with more data and less waste

Samsara touches every part of how Lanes Group runs. The next phase adds another layer.

The company is looking at integrating fuel purchasing data into Samsara's fuel and energy dashboard, putting cost and consumption alongside idling and driver efficiency metrics in one place. Custom dashboards are being built for ESG board reporting so leadership can track progress against sustainability targets without pulling data manually.

The idling programme is expanding too. Samsara's Send to Coaching functionality will enable targeted coaching for drivers who continue to generate unproductive idling events. Connected Training will push videos on idling reduction and the EV transition directly to drivers via the app, keeping the campaign going as the business grows and new drivers join.

"Samsara started as our fleet management system," said Amber Kirkby. "Now it's the central platform for data and reporting across the whole organisation, including our ESG strategy.”

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