Benchmarking: What do fleets measure and why?

Is benchmarking important? What do you currently benchmark on your fleet? What do you do with the results? What data gets reported at board level and how seriously that information is taken by senior management? What information would you like to benchmark but can’t (and why can’t you)?

These were questions discussed by fleet managers at a session during the virtual Fleet200 Executive Club meeting in September, inspired by a presentation by Simon Turner, campaigns manager at Driving for Better Business, which has launched a benchmarking programme backed by the Department for Transport and supported by Highways England and Fleet News.

Points raised by the resulting debate:

· Not all benchmarking has to be against other fleets; internal benchmarking across different departments or just between individual drivers is a good way to identify issues. Data from telematics is also a useful way to internally benchmark fleet performance, especially on utilisation and fines.

· General agreement that it is important to benchmark driver behaviour, but it needs the right matrix/parameters to start from, e.g. what is good behaviour?

· Information from benchmarking needs to be seen at board level.

· Important areas for benchmarking include: productivity and utilisation, vehicle safety, environment and emissions, vehicle maintenance, and grey fleet

· Some fleets also benchmark employee engagement with the fleet.

· However, fleets need support as there is potentially so much data to manage and multiple agendas to juggle.

· One fleets has done a lot of work on driver benchmarking, including risk scorecards, which has helped it to prioritise where to put available resource for the most benefit. However, it would like to benchmark crash data, but the information from the insurance company is limited and the biggest issue is companies measuring accidents in different ways, so is it like-for-like?

· A big benefit of benchmarking is the fact that it highlights procedures. Analysis of those procedures shows where the risks are, and they can be presented in financial terms which makes any changes/investment easier to sell internally.

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