'Until recently, those responsible for managing the UK's fleets have been world-class when it comes to making savings wherever possible. Their remit has included purchasing cars at the cheapest possible price, maximising residuals, leasing vehicles at the best rates, keeping maintenance costs within budget and keeping the lid on items such as fuel and insurance.
So why on earth are so many failing to take advantage of the latest – and perhaps the last – major opportunity to make huge savings on the cost of fleet operation? I'm talking here about the economies possible with new technology. By using the internet, it's possible to save massive amounts of both time and money.
For West Midlands Ambulance Service, which has a 400-vehicle fleet, it took three hours of 'down time' for the in-house computer to do its month-end run. That interrupted the routines of up to six people. Now, thanks to a web-based fleet management system, this task can be accomplished in a minute.
Our company pioneered the use of the internet in fleet management. We produced the first true web application fleet management system.
The most significant factor in this new technology is what Chevin calls SCDP (Single Centralised Data Pool). This ability to get everything in one place, no matter how geographically spread out, is in our view the greatest single advance in fleet management since computers were first used to keep track of company cars and vans.
One of the best ways to save money is to keep track of where it's going. Is your fleet doing this, or does it have accounts and spreadsheets all over the place, telling you a lot of things on their own but failing to give 'the big picture'.
If your operation has such a disorganised record keeping system, imagine instead having the ability to ask simple but vital questions like 'How much does one of our cars cost to run over its lifetime?', 'What is the annual cost of running vehicles at our Manchester site compared to our site in Godalming (or even Paris)?', 'What is our entire fuel bill per month?' or, more currently, 'How many vehicles have travelled in and out of central London this month and how much extra is congestion charging costing?'
A single centralised data pool enables you to see everything at a glance, as a manager should. Here, the use of web technology allows a good fleet management system to actively draw together all the data, including transaction details from your suppliers. The new technology means managers can free themselves from the drudgery of having to look up answers and produce endless reports for other departments or those they report to. Why? Because others in the organisation can produce their own reports, using secure passwords given to them by the fleet, granting access only to selected parts of the database.
This kind of operational streamlining may now make it possible for many fleets that currently employ outside fleet management companies to do it themselves.
I may be stirring up a hornet's nest in the outsourced fleet management sector, but I do believe that this new technology may give fleet managers an extra set of choices – one of which will be the ability to bring things back in-house. Perhaps in the future many more fleets will therefore employ outside fleet consultants as advisers and not doers.
Of course all this hangs on having rapid and reliable access to data. I caution anyone looking at internet systems to ensure they are true web applications, which work with the speed of big websites, able to cope with perhaps thousands of users all logging on at the same time. This is a far cry from so-called web-enabled systems, which are often 'desktop' systems made to work over the net, using additional 'gap' software that slows them down. Such systems can become sluggish with just a few users logged on.
Fleet managers have a big opportunity here. Let's see the industry taking advantage of it.'
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