THE CAR AND TRUCK FLEET AND LEASING MANAGEMENT MAGAZINE
Our long-time editor and fleet expert, Mike Antich, offers opinions and ideas on the overall commercial fleet industry and draws interesting comments from fleet managers and other industry professionals from across the country. Mike was inducted in the Fleet Hall of Fame in 2010.
If you want to provide added value to your company, you need to view fleet as a business and not simply an aggregation of assets to be managed cost-effectively. The fastest way to improve your bottom line is to increase fleet utilization, which increases the productivity of each individual truck.
Blog: Vocational trucks are susceptible to being targeted for staged accidents, which involves maneuvering an unsuspecting employee driver into an intentional crash in order to make a false insurance claim or to file a lawsuit against the driver’s employer.
Blog: Management must develop remuneration policies and incentive plans encouraging procurement to cooperatively work with in-house fleet leadership to support attainment of larger strategic goals allowing fleet to cost-effectively fulfill its corporate mission.
Procurement initiatives to reduce fleet cost structure primarily focus on hard costs with secondary consideration given to soft cost reduction. Some procurement teams often don’t appreciate the sizable impact of soft cost reductions and how they can lead to larger hard cost reductions.
Many upfitters are operating at capacity, necessitating fleets be extra attentive to specifications because any engineering change will even further delay OTD. It is times like today that reinforces the value of advance planning and the creation of fleet metrics to measure progress.
Procurement underperforms in cross-collaboration initiatives with other corporate spend categories, such as Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) and supply-chain management. A key collaboration opportunity is in the area of fleet safety.
We all agree that planning is crucial to the success of any project, but it is especially important when spec’ing a new upfit. Conceptually, most fleet managers will agree with this statement, but it isn’t always followed in actual practice.
A fleet cost reduction program goes straight to the corporate bottom line. If a company operates at a 10% annual net profit margin, reducing annual fleet expenses by $100,000 is the equivalent of generating $1 million in sales. Although fleet managers manage hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars in corporate assets, only half are incentivized to achieve targeted performance goals. I advocate incentivization should be a universal best practice extended to all fleet managers.
I believe volume penetration of fleets by autonomous vehicles will take much longer to occur than what is predicted in today’s optimistic forecasts. Conceptually, autonomous vehicles are technologically feasible, but, as they say, the devil is in the details. One thing is certain, as we trail blaze new ground, so too will we trail blaze new problems.
Corporate mobility management to evolve into multi-level responsibilities for asset lifecycle management, administration of multi-modal mobility services, and deployment of productivity and safety tools to support a mobile workforce in the field.
