Fleet outsourcing not a 'utopia'

Businesses often see outsourcing the management of their fleet as a “utopia” but if internal expertise are not retained it can be “quite dangerous”.

That was the warning from Ross Jackson, chief executive officer of fleet management and consultancy firm Fleet Operations, in the outsourcing best practice seminar at Fleet Management Live.

“By all means, seek external advice that says ‘this what you should do and this is why you should do it’ but in a business you need to make decisions about your business, about your people, about your investment strategy, about what it needs to retain and attract the right people to your business,” Jackson said.

He cited one example where a business had “outsourced fleet to the nth degree” and no one in the organisation understood how the fleet operated.

“We had to re-teach that organisation how to manage fleet,” he said.

If fleet is core to your business then “think long and hard” about what impact outsourcing could have, Jackson advised.

“Understand the importance of what you need to retain in your organisation,” he said. “Be honest and look at what sits best internally and what sits best externally. It's very rare that everything sits best externally.”