How Does Your Fleet Stack Up?
By Paul Fortin, LeasePlan USA, and Saskia Harreman, LeasePlan International
Benchmarking your fleet can give you a comprehensive view of your current practices by stacking up your performance data, financial results and other metrics against comparison data to identify areas of improvement or to validate existing practices.
Through benchmarking, fleet managers evaluate various aspects of their company car offering and fleet processes in relation to best practice companies, usually within a peer group defined for the purpose of comparison. This allows organizations to establish plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance.
An efficient fleet strategy based on benchmarking will help develop a fleet that is fit for its purpose, and serve as guidance on how it should be managed.
Indianapolis’ Car-Sharing Service is Generating Controversy
BlueIndy, one of the nation's first municipally supported one-way EV ride-sharing services, just went into effect on Sept. 2. The service eliminates many vehicle ownership hassles including insurance, maintenance, 24/7 roadside assistance, GPS and parking searches. All are courtesy of the city and Bollore Group, the French industrial and energy conglomerate that is investing $41 million to set up and run the service on a 15-year contract.
"It's there when you want it and when you need it," said Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard in the Sept. 2 ceremony inaugurating a service he championed, sometimes in the face of a storm of political opposition.
Nearly 10,000 Deaths Could Be Prevented and More Than $250 Billion Saved with Greater Use of Driver Assistance Technologies
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Could Avert Almost 30 Percent of Crashes, but Stakeholders Must Take Action to Spur Increased ADAS Adoption, Says Study by The Boston Consulting Group. If widely adopted, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) could generate tremendous benefits to society, sharply reducing the number, cost, and severity of automotive accidents.
"Because the vast majority of crashes in the United States are caused by driver error, the lack of adoption of these technologies within the U.S. fleet is a significant missed opportunity," says Xavier Mosquet, North America leader of BCG's Automotive practice and a coauthor of the study, which was commissioned by the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA). "This is especially true considering that ADAS technologies also pave the way for partially and fully autonomous vehicles, which could further reduce crashes—and their cost to society—by 90 percent or more."
Great Expectations
At this month's AFLA conference we had the opportunity to meet with John Norris, president and CEO of AmeriFleet, and talk about the current focus of this fleet logistics company. John affirms something that author Jeofrey Bean has asserted in his monthly columns about CX: The expectations set by transactions that we have in our personal, retail lives – think Amazon and Apple – morph more and more into the B2B environment. Read our interview with John in this week’s issue.
Speaking of expectations, hear what LeasePlan’s Tom Casey has to say about realistic time frames for new vehicle deliveries. Every new model year brings its challenges.
Don’t forget: NETS’ annual Drive Safely Work Week campaign is being conducted October 5-9, but if those dates don't work for your company, you can use the free, downloadable materials any time of the year.
Enjoy this issue, and be sure to check in at FleetManagementWeekly.com for daily updates.
Janice Sutton
Executive Editor
A Call to Action: The Metamorphosis of Fleet Management into Workforce Mobility Management
By Ed Pierce, Founder, ITA Fleet Communications
Anyone involved with marketing in the fleet industry can’t help but read the news from Europe about “mobility management” despite scant relevancy to North American fleets. Is it a European-only phenomenon? What are the implications for fleet managers? How will it impact fleet product and service providers?
First of all, the term is confusing. Google (yes, used as a verb) “mobility management,” and there are myriad topics, companies and services related to everything from mobile devices to senior mobility. A search of “multi-modal mobility management,” provides a lesson in government transportation planning. There’s very little, if anything, related to North American fleets.
An understanding of the term among fleet people generally is lacking. There is a pervasive misperception that mobility management involves adding bicycles, web-based minicab services, and bus route schedules to a fleet operation. This oversimplification is understandable given the inherent complexity of the topic.
However, by looking at more familiar business trends, the move to workforce mobility management makes sense.
