Vital role benchmarking can play in future of fleet

Benchmarking – measuring, recording and acting on the vital statistics of Britain’s fleets – is the next big step towards improving road safety, sustainability, compliance and profitability. And it’s long overdue.

That’s the view of a leading panel of transport experts convened to pioneer a major new online benchmarking process, aimed at revolutionising the way professionals analyse their own – and other organisations’ – performance.

Under the wing of Driving for Better Business (DfBB) and RoadSafe, in partnership with Fleet News, the Department for Transport-funded project aims to overhaul the way fleet managers, bosses, business owners and drivers measure their individual road safety and environmental performance.

The tool will, for the first time, allow organisations, large and small, to compare and contrast their achievements against others in the same sector, giving them the ammunition to dramatically improve their own performance.

Benchmarking will provide participants with important new comparative data to support internal business cases and provide valuable sources of information for their sustainability reporting programmes.

For many, the benchmarking project will be the first time they have systematically examined road safety and environmental performance in their organisation, or engaged in the systematic collection of road safety data.

“We know there are many with little understanding of where to start with collecting appropriate information, and how best to analyse and interpret it once they have it,” says Adrian Walsh, RoadSafe executive director. “This new initiative will assist these processes by providing standardised methods, through an open and easily accessible online platform.”