April 15, 2014
Editor's Analysis & Top Industry News


Sutton_Janice Speechless in Minneapolis!

I was so very proud and hon­ored to be named 2014 Affil­i­ate of the Year by the NAFA Fleet Man­age­ment Asso­ci­a­tion last week in Min­neapo­lis at the 2014 Insti­tute & Expo! Few of us win awards solely because of our own actions and this one is no excep­tion. Had I not been totally sur­prised and (uncom­monly) speech­less when my name was announced as a FLEXY win­ner, I would have had the pres­ence of mind to thank our won­der­ful and tal­ented video and edi­to­r­ial team at Fleet Man­age­ment Weekly: Vic­tor Noerdlinger, Ted Roberts, Con­nie She­dron, Mike Sheldrick, and Molly Acridge.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to all of the 2014 FLEXY Award win­ners announced last Tues­day evening at the Fleet Excel­lence Awards Gala! It was quite an evening.

Thank you, NAFA!

Jan­ice Sut­ton
Exec­u­tive Editor


AFLA_Logo_NCDs.gif Register Now: AFLA 2014 Mid-Year Forum

Reg­is­tra­tion Closes April 21st for the AFLA 2014 Mid-Year Forum
May 1, 2014 — 9 AM — 3 PM — The Enter­prise Cen­ter at Burling­ton County Col­lege, Mt Lau­rel, NJ.

  • “Fleet at 30,000 Feet: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We’re Going“
    Scott Pat­tullo, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent of Sales, Mar­ket­ing and Account Man­age­ment, Wheels
  • “Per­sonal Safety for the Busi­ness Trav­eler“
    Phil Moser, Vice Pres­i­dent, Advanced Dri­ver Train­ing Services
  • “It’s O.K. to Play“
    Keynote Speaker: Evan Mar­cus, Dil­lon Marcus

cunningham-michele

VIDEO: Opportunities Around Material Handling Equipment

Some of today’s fleets could use a lit­tle more help with mate­r­ial han­dling equip­ment, and PHH Arval is there to offer end-to-end asset man­age­ment — includ­ing vis­i­bil­ity of inven­tory, data sur­round­ing inven­tory, third-party over­sight of main­te­nance ser­vices, and much more.

VIDEO: What to Attend Next
elliott-bill
  AFLA’s First-Ever Mid-Year Forum
 

AFLA will be host­ing its first-ever mid-year forum on May 1 in New Jer­sey, and will be fea­tur­ing new insights from a vari­ety of indus­try experts. You can reg­is­ter and get more infor­ma­tion at aflaonline.com.


Click here to watch video
VIDEO: The International Approach
Damen_Hans_FleetVision
  Meeting Demand for Global Education
 

Hans Damen, Part­ner at Fleet Vision in Antwerp, Bel­gium, shares his insights into the con­cerns of global fleets — includ­ing hav­ing global report­ing tools, and main­tain­ing effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tions with customers.


Click here to read more



The Fleet Spot


Luann Dunkerley Luann Dunkerley at NPTC: Truck Fleets Gain Greater Control of Assets by Outsourcing Accident Management

Truck fleets that have out­sourced their acci­dent man­age­ment activ­i­ties are find­ing they have gained greater vis­i­bil­ity and con­trol over their vehi­cle assets.  That’s the mes­sage CEI is bring­ing to the National Pri­vate Truck Council’s 2014 Annual Edu­ca­tion Man­age­ment Con­fer­ence and Exhi­bi­tion next week.

“Rather than giv­ing up con­trol, CEI’s truck fleet clients are find­ing that our process and online tech­nol­ogy are giv­ing them greater aware­ness of where their dam­aged vehi­cles are in the repair process, and greater con­trol over of how much they’re spend­ing to get them back on the road,” said Luann Dunker­ley, CEI’s national busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ager for truck and ser­vice fleets.

READ MORE 

Bannu Hurtig Bannu Hurtig Senior Consultant at Mercury Associates Canada

Bannu Hur­tig joined Mer­cury Asso­ciates as a Senior Con­sul­tant after retir­ing from Bell Canada Enter­prises, Inc. Dur­ing her 28 years at Bell, she held man­age­ment posi­tions in wire­less tech­nol­ogy, mar­ket­ing, net­work tech­nol­ogy, and as Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Bell’s Vehi­cle Fleet Solu­tions orga­ni­za­tion, with a nation­wide fleet of 13,000+ vehi­cles for upwards of 15 sub­sidiaries of Bell.

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Kate Vigneau 2014 Katherine Vigneau Senior Manager at Mercury Associates New Canadian Office

Mer­cury Asso­ciates, Inc., an inde­pen­dent fleet man­age­ment con­sult­ing firm in North Amer­ica, has opened a Cana­dian office in Mid­hurst, Ontario, a sub­urb of Toronto. Mercury’s Cana­dian fleet con­sult­ing ser­vices will be man­aged by two of Canada’s best known fleet man­age­ment pro­fes­sion­als, Kather­ine Vigneau, CAFM and Bannu Hur­tig.

Vigneau recently joined Mer­cury as a Senior Man­ager. Pre­vi­ously, she spent more than 26 years in the Cana­dian Army, hold­ing var­i­ous posi­tions in logis­tics and trans­porta­tion, both in Canada and abroad, includ­ing serv­ing as the Army’s Fleet Man­ager, respon­si­ble for pol­icy over­sight and man­age­ment of a fleet of over 32,000 vehicles.

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NAFA I&E FLEXY Award Winners!  

Excite­ment abounded last Tues­day evening as the win­ners of the 2014 FLEXY Awards ascended the stage and claimed their awards.

The FLEXYs are open to all fleet pro­fes­sion­als, regard­less of whether or not they were mem­bers of NAFA Fleet Man­age­ment Asso­ci­a­tion. Indus­try lead­ers, act­ing as judges in the selec­tion process for final­ists and win­ners, never saw the names of nom­i­nees or the orga­ni­za­tions they work for. Vot­ing was 100 per­cent blind; based solely upon the actions and ideas listed by the nom­i­nees on their sub­mis­sion forms. This allowed for unbi­ased selec­tion based strictly on the qual­ity of nom­i­nee accomplishments.

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Managing Driver Behavior  
Ed Pierce, ItsTheArts.com

As a mar­ket­ing and brand­ing pro­fes­sional in the fleet indus­try for many years, I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to explain how to build a down­stream mar­ket­ing strat­egy that wins the sup­port of dri­vers and field fleet admin­is­tra­tors. Fleet man­agers know that these are poten­tial “advo­cates” whose behav­ior can help or hin­der achieve­ment of oper­a­tional goals.

The most-often asked follow-up ques­tion I get is “HOW does one effec­tively com­mu­ni­cate with dri­vers who have much more on their minds than adher­ing to fleet pol­icy as they go about their busi­ness day.” Once again, I like to apply marketing-based solu­tions to the prob­lem of “cut­ting through the clutter.”

Here are my 10 tips for deliv­er­ing a mes­sage and mak­ing it stick:

Tip #1: Exploit emotions.

Adver­tis­ers do it all the time: peo­ple share sim­i­lar emo­tional needs: to feel attrac­tive, to feel fit and healthy, to be liked, to feel secure, to save embar­rass­ment, to avoid feel­ing guilty. Facts cer­tainly mat­ter in adver­tis­ing, but they mat­ter because they can gen­er­ate and rein­force emotion.

In the case of dri­vers, you might be sell­ing the need to change dan­ger­ous behaviors—for exam­ple, when you want peo­ple to buckle their seat belts, pay atten­tion while dri­ving, or not drive impaired—some emo­tional but­tons become more promi­nent than oth­ers. In these cases, the needs to feel healthy and safe, and to avoid guilt or embar­rass­ment, to demon­strate loy­alty to an employer…these are obvi­ous emo­tional targets.

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Fleet Trends & Issues


Dennis StraightDonlen Releases Next Generation FleetWeb

Donlen offi­cially launched the next gen­er­a­tion of FleetWeb, its fully inte­grated fleet man­age­ment plat­form, dur­ing NAFA 2014. Build­ing on enhance­ments released in Q4 2013, FleetWeb has under­gone fur­ther major site wide changes to improve users’ pro­duc­tiv­ity and over­all experience.

“We’ve changed the nav­i­ga­tion to bring the most-used areas for­ward so users can access impor­tant infor­ma­tion more quickly and more eas­ily,” said Den­nis Straight, Donlen’s CIO and SVP IT, “But what’s hap­pen­ing behind the scenes is where the true pro­duc­tiv­ity gains are achieved. The HTML-5 plat­form com­bined with upgraded servers is mak­ing FleetWeb the most effi­cient and user-friendly fleet man­age­ment tool in the indus­try today.”

READ MORE

gps-tracking-software-downtimeKeep Downtime to a Minimum with GPS Fleet Tracking

For daily oper­a­tions, it is impor­tant that your GPS track­ing soft­ware is up and run­ning at all times. That’s why it is imper­a­tive when look­ing for a new solu­tion that you ask prospec­tive GPS track­ing providers about downtime.

So, what is GPS track­ing down­time? This term is used to describe peri­ods when soft­ware is tem­porar­ily unavail­able due to things like main­te­nance. This becomes a big issue when you begin to relay on this soft­ware for mul­ti­ple aspects of daily busi­ness, because what good are all of the fea­tures when sys­tems are down frequently?

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cleanfuelPropane Industry’s First Fully Integrated Fuel Management System Unveiled

Clean­FUEL USA announced imme­di­ate avail­abil­ity of the propane auto­gas industry’s first com­plete fuel net­work man­age­ment sys­tem for elec­tronic dis­pensers, Clean­FUEL eCON­NECT.

Fleet man­agers can eco­nom­i­cally mon­i­tor and con­trol fuel inven­to­ries faster and eas­ier than ever before using Clean­FUEL ECONNECT with real-time data insight, flex­i­ble report stor­age and remote access capabilities.

“While the fleet indus­try has made amaz­ing strides in adop­tion of propane auto­gas, it has also lacked an eco­nom­i­cal and inno­v­a­tive solu­tion at the pump that uti­lizes all that soft­ware tech­nol­ogy has to offer,” said Cur­tis Don­ald­son, founder and man­ag­ing part­ner of Clean­FUEL USA.

READ MORE

telogisTelogis Named Company of the Year

Frost & Sul­li­van rec­og­nizes Tel­o­gis with the 2013 North Amer­i­can Frost & Sul­li­van Award for Com­pany of the Year in light com­mer­cial vehi­cle telem­at­ics based on its recent analy­sis of the mar­ket. Over the past sev­eral years, Tel­o­gis has pur­sued an aggres­sive growth strat­egy focus­ing on invest­ments in inno­va­tion and expand­ing its global reach.

“Over­all, Tel­o­gis has gained a rep­u­ta­tion as a mission-critical tech­nol­ogy part­ner that offers a range of next-generation solu­tions to com­pa­nies that require work order man­age­ment, rout­ing, telem­at­ics, as well as mobile inte­gra­tion and nav­i­ga­tion ser­vices,” said Nan­dini Tare, indus­try ana­lyst at Frost & Sullivan.

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Fleet Sustainability  

NAFA is devel­op­ing a pro­gram which will encour­age increased effi­ciency and reduced emis­sions and fuel use among vehi­cle fleets. Devel­oped in con­junc­tion with CALSTART, the NAFA Sus­tain­able Fleet Stan­dard Pro­gram is one of its kind.

“The impor­tance of sus­tain­able prac­tices becomes more evi­dent each day,” said NAFA Pres­i­dent Claude T. Mas­ters, CAFM. “By becom­ing more energy inde­pen­dent and effi­cient our mem­bers will extend ben­e­fits to their bot­tom line and their cus­tomer base.”

READ MORE

 
Fleet Driver Safety  

The CEI Group, Inc. (CEI) offered pre­views of Dri­ver­Care ™ 5.0, the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of its sig­na­ture online fleet dri­ver safety and risk man­age­ment sys­tem, at the NAFA Fleet Man­age­ment Asso­ci­a­tion 2014 Insti­tute and Expo.

“The pri­mary goals of Dri­ver­Care™ 5.0 are to make it eas­ier, faster and more intu­itive for fleet and risk pro­fes­sional admin­is­tra­tors and field man­agers to find the infor­ma­tion they’re look­ing for, and to make it effort­less to switch between CEI’s online fleet safety and acci­dent man­age­ment sys­tems,” said Brian Kin­niry, CEI’s man­ager of risk and safety services.

Among the enhance­ments in Dri­ver­Care ™5.0 are:

Dri­ver Score­card - An entirely new page in Dri­ver­Care, the Dri­ver Score­card pro­vides a snap­shot, high-level sum­mary of all the kinds of infor­ma­tion in a driver’s record, and enables fleet admin­is­tra­tors to drill down into any cat­e­gory for more detailed information.

“For exam­ple, the score­card might say a dri­ver has two acci­dents, has taken five online lessons and has two open items to com­plete,” Mr. Kin­niry explained.”Instead of see­ing all that detail on one page, or using a nav­i­ga­tion tool­bar to find it, a fleet admin­is­tra­tor can click on any item directly on the score­card to get the details.”

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Driving the Global Fleet  

ARI® has announced that it has acquired Ger­man com­pany netcar24. The tech­nol­ogy com­pany devel­ops and offers inno­v­a­tive enter­prise soft­ware solu­tions for the fleet man­age­ment industry.

“We are so pleased to have netcar24 join the ARI fam­ily of com­pa­nies,” said ARI Pres­i­dent Carl A. Ortell. “netcar24 has a long his­tory of devel­op­ing ground­break­ing prod­ucts that help fleets oper­ate more effi­ciently and trans­par­ently, which is directly in-line with ARI’s approach to fleet man­age­ment. I believe their drive to offer state-of-the-art tech­nol­ogy that pro­vides real value will be a tremen­dous addi­tion to ARI.”

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Fleet Management Resources 
AmeriFleet
Offering a nationwide vehicle delivery and relocation service; serving the corporate and commercial fleet industry.
LeasePlan
LeasePlan is the world's leading high-touch service provider for vehicle leasing and fleet management.
PHH
Customizing global fleet management to achieve your goals.
ARI
Driven fleet professionals. Driving results.
NAFA
NAFA is the association for the diverse vehicle fleet management profession regardless of organizational type, geographic location, or fleet composition.
The CEI Group Inc.
North America's largest accident management and fleet driver safety company.
GPS Insight
GPS Insight offers GPS tracking solutions to meet your organization's unique requirements and challenges.
PARS
PARS' mission is to provide you with high-quality service at competitive prices for all of your transportation needs.