Appeal made to fleet managers to help raise industry standards

Driving for Better Business is appealing for experienced fleet managers to join a benchmarking project aimed at improving standards across the industry.

The organisation, together with Roadsafe, has ben asked by the Department for Transport to develop its risk management project to give it much greater value across the industry, particularly for less experienced fleet managers.

It will allow organisations to compare their performance in a number of areas so they can identify where they are strong and where they can improve, as well as use the information to win buy-in from the board for new initiatives.

Simon Turner (pictured), campaign manager at DfBB, said: “We’d like to form a benchmarking group with some experienced fleet managers who can help us understand where the challenges are and what the key elements that should be benchmarked are.

“We need to make fleet managers understand that benchmarking helps them within their whole business.

“It gives everybody within the business confidence the fleet is performing at its highest level, so the MD can trust the fleet manager to be on top of all the risks, the finance director can rely on them to control costs and the staff under their control know they’ve got a boss who understands what’s going on and is minimising the risk for them on the road.”

Turner said the benchmarking project will look beyond just legal compliance and include best practice such as whether a fleet uses telematics, has updated its driver policies recently, and if driver behaviour is monitored.

“What we really want is for this benchmarking project to delve a bit deeper and find what other fleets are doing to get their good results?”

Turner said the benchmarking project can also help fleet managers to get their boards to take their vehicle operations – particularly risk management - more seriously.

“Last year we did a leadership report which went out to 255 executive directors to ask them how often work-related road risk was discussed at their board meetings,” he added.

“Quite a few said always or frequently, but there is a significant number who I don't think discuss it regularly enough.

“I feel we could improve that through a benchmarking system that would allow fleet managers to present their current state of play in a more coherent way so they can go to senior leadership and say ‘look, this is the position we have now, this is what other people are doing. We are falling behind’.

“One of our key objectives is to make the benchmarking results available to fleets so they can be taken more seriously at board level.

“It needs to be comprehensive and clear, because we also found boards don't always know best.

“We're going to help bring those people who are struggling to be heard up to up to a higher standard.”

Give your support

Any fleet manager interested in helping can contact Simon Turner on simon@drivingforbetterbusiness.com.

> The above was shared with Fleet News at the September virtual meeting of the Fleet200 Executive Club.