Fleets in focus: Miele

Domestic appliance manufacturer Miele has successfully outsourced the management of its 175 vehicles to CLM for the past 10 years, with project manager Tony Stephens keeping a watchful eye on the relationship.

Stephens says that companies shouldn’t be frightened to outsource, but they need to understand that “it’s not fit and forget”.

“You can’t just give it to someone else and expect that it will go on happening as well as you would do it yourself,” he says. “You have to be able to keep an eye on what’s going on and maintain the standard.

“It’s also true that the service provider will be happiest if you do that because they don’t like working in a vacuum.

"They would rather have some guidance because they want to retain your business.”

An instruction process manual was agreed with CLM at the start of the relationship.

Miele fleet administrator Bob Clarke keeps in daily contact with CLM while Stephens focuses on strategic and policy issues for the 175-vehicle fleet.

Stephens works three days a week but only 20-30% of his time is spent on fleet, the rest is taken up with other projects such as property acquisition.

Every three months he has a review meeting with CLM to examine all the fleet costs, anything unusual that might have happened over the past three months and “every single complaint”.

“There will be complaints,” Stephens says. “It’s inseparable from doing lots of transactions with lots of vehicles. But we deal with every one of them.”

The benefit of using a fleet management company is “strength in depth”, according to Stephens.

“We couldn’t afford to have more than two or three people running our fleet which means that with the best will in the world there are going to be occasions when there is no one available at the end of the phone here,” Stephen says.

“That doesn’t happen with a properly run fleet management company.”

Miele decided to outsource its car and van fleet after outsourcing its commercial vehicle fleet. Stephens was in charge of the outsourcing process to CLM.

He needed the supplier to demonstrate that it had a robust back office, that it could provide sound advice on types of vehicles and that it could interface well with the garages and van centres.

Understanding Miele’s operational requirements was also important.

“Having the vehicle available and full of the right bits all the time is vital for a service engineering fleet like ours,” Stephens says.

“Our market success depends on how good our service offering is. If you end up having a lot of vehicle problems then the consequences are disastrous.”

CLM understands that if a Miele van is off the road it has to be dealt with immediately.