Most people think of a “dashboard” as the display panel in a vehicle where the speedometer and odometer are located. Today, business people also think of a dashboard as an at-a-glance view of key business performance indicators via easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

Mike Butsch, strategic fleet alliance manager for Joy Global, used to spend many hours analyzing and reporting on his diverse fleet. Now, thanks to a new dashboard application, he can quickly demonstrate his fleet’s performance in a format others can easily understand. Joy Global, headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis., manufactures underground and surface mining equipment and offers aftermarket-related services. The company operates through two divisions: P&H Mining Equipment and Joy Mining Machinery.

Joy Mining Machinery and P&H Mining Equipment operate separate fleets. The Joy Mining fleet serves both service and delivery functions and includes sedans and light to medium trucks. The P&H fleet primarily serves the aboveground mining industry and comprises 100-percent trucks — half 4x4 and the other half larger service bodies or flat-bed trucks. Butsch manages both fleets, supporting each division’s vehicle needs, cultures, and drivers.

The Biggest Challenge
One of Butsch’s biggest challenges is providing senior management with meaningful and easy-to-digest fleet-related data. Particularly demanding is assembling information for semi-annual business reviews. It’s important for Butsch to create effective management reports linking trends he sees in the field to actual data, or to recommend or make changes based on data patterns.

When PHH Arval — Joy Global’s fleet management partner — introduced PHH InterActive Dashboard last year, Butsch found an easier way to get the information he needed, act on it faster, and provide analysis to others in his organization.

In fact, Butsch served on the technology advisory board that helped PHH develop and beta-test the Dashboard, providing insights and suggestions to ensure the summary reporting tools delivered what clients needed.

PHH InterActive Dashboard provides summary graphs and charts that roll up data from PHH InterActive’s information resources, enabling Butsch to quickly and easily track key performance indicators and monitor fleet trends. The Dashboard includes a variety of past historical data, allowing users to compare months, years, quarters, or a rolling flow of time segments.

“I now conduct monthly, instead of semi-annual, reviews of key data,” says Butsch. “The Dashboard makes it easy to identify problems faster and demonstrate trends to my senior managers. I can educate stakeholders about where the costs are surfacing and explain how to control or eliminate those costs. And I can get buy-in at the local level more easily because I can show trends and pictures that make sense.” The biggest difference: “It’s much easier for me to focus on other fleet processes and issues rather than on writing reports,” said Butsch.