Veteran industry readers may remember a lot of faxing between leasing companies and garages. Phone call tennis, reams of spreadsheets (still the norm for some fleets, but that's another story) were just part of the job for booking a service or maintenance job. 

Then came Epyx in 2000. Founded by a team of seven and led by then-managing director Greg Connell, the company's aim was to do away with all the above and make it easier for leasing firms to transact with garages. It does that via its main product, the 1link Service Network, which became the go-to platform to facilitate fleet SMR work after its 2002 launch. Today, it is used by most of the UK's biggest leasing firms, nearly all the major motor manufacturers via their franchised dealers, and no shortage of independent garages. 

Epyx's ubiquity means you do not need to be a fleet veteran to have crossed paths with it. That is partly because it claims to manage more than four million cars, but also because its products have mushroomed into realms beyond SMR. Branches that would follow the original platform include 1link Relicensing, which allows fleet managers to tax vehicles automatically, 1link Disposal Network for defleeting and remarketing, and 1link Hire Network for rental bookings - among others. Its growing product portfolio and industry-standard status led to an acquisition by industry goliath Fleetcor in 2014. 

"If you speak to the customers, they know us as 1link," quips Tim Meadows, who re-joined the firm as chief commercial officer last year. Meadows was Epyx's director of account management between 2016 and 2020, before hopping over to r2c online (still within the Fleetcor camp) for a spell as managing director. A familiar face in fleet, he spent 11 years at Leaseplan, finishing as brand director for public sector automotive leasing, and did stints at Lombard, Custom Fleet, and Lex.

"We genuinely did break the back of the telephone and manual processes that were in place," he explains, "the main thing businesses are looking to do is improve their efficiency. so we try to speed up that process. If you are a company car driver taking your vehicle to be serviced, the job can be approved instantaneously rather than having to wait for someone to answer a phone, etc. The turnaround time for a vehicle being in the garage can be a lot faster than it would ever have been under a manual process. The work is approved and completed and the vehicle is back on the road as quickly as possible. 

"That has just increased as time becomes more and more expensive. Digitalising the processes for the leasing companies has become more prevalent over the years - whether it's their quoting systems, or the way they interface with their drivers through apps. All of that fits in very nicely into 1link, because it's people-free - if that makes sense - in terms of having to have people at each end doing the manual processes."

It is a long time by any standards, but 23 years in business is practically an eon in tech circles, so the firm's core focus of hooking up drivers with garages has naturally become more sophisticated. One of its more recent milestones was its Driver Booking Module - or DBM - which first appeared in late 2021 and is effectively an API (Application Programming Interface: intermediary software that allows two applications to talk to each other) for dealer management systems - the software that garages use to run their operations - shortened to DMS in the trade. 

For non-tech whizzes, the DBM can talk to the calendar in the garage's software and find out when it has available slots for service and repair work. Drivers using 1link can then pick a convenient day and time. If you have ever used Calendly to book a Zoom or a Teams call, it is a similar concept, and in its initial form, offered a choice of three potential booking slots. Leasing firm Ogilvie Fleet was an early adopter, and at the time, it praised the module's hands-off nature, saying, "the ability for drivers to book direct online using the new module is a real advantage." 

Advancement though it was, Meadows admits the DBM was not perfect in its earliest form: "The way the bookings were made is that the driver would offer three dates [and] the garages would give us an indication of when they could make bookings. It came with a little calendar, and [unavailable dates] would be blanked out red, and then there'd be greens from a certain date onwards, but that was just an indication of potentially when they could do it. and the garage would respond with a, 'yes, it's booked in,' or 'actually, no, we can't do those dates; here are some alternatives,' and it went backwards and forwards like that, which was fine, but from a driver's perspective, it wasn't great."