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.
Most in procurement take the position that fleet’s primary responsibility is to buy assets and services, which annually can range from millions to tens of millions of dollars in expenditures. This amount of corporate spend requires it be managed by someone with superb negotiation skills and proven procurement acumen. But why isn’t this true for all spend categories?
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.
Since 2016, there has been an ongoing uptick in fuel card fraud. In light of this, it is important for companies to develop a fraud prevention strategy addressing misuse, slippage, and outright fraud.
If you think being a fleet manager is stressful, try being a Navy SEAL. Former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill, best known for claiming to have shot Osama bin Laden, recently wrote a new book entitled, “The Operator.”
Conventional wisdom in the fleet market is often wrong. If we roll back the calendar, the conventional wisdom about fuel prices was that there would be ebbs and flows in price per gallon rates, but the overall price trajectory would trend upward. The flaw with conventional wisdom is that it only works when no new variables are inserted into future projections. A case in point is the shale oil revolution, which now has experts predicting oil prices will remain flat for the foreseeable future.
Summer is a busy time in fleet. There’s an abundance of next-model-year OEM fleet meetings, new-model intros, and industry conferences, which offer ample opportunities to “talk fleet” with the movers and shakers of our industry. If you want to know what's happening in the fleet market, you need to talk with fleet managers -- lots of them.
The stability of fuel pricing over the past 36 months, along with ongoing improvements in vehicle fuel economy, have been the key factors keeping fleet operating costs relatively flat.
Senior management exerts intense pressure on fleet managers to control and/or reduce vehicle acquisition and operating expenses. To accomplish this, a fleet managers can pursue three different cost-control strategies — cost savings, cost deferral, or cost avoidance. In order to implement a successful cost-control strategy you need to institutionalize the mechanisms to curb money-wasting behaviors.
There is a difference between a well-managed fleet and a best-in-class fleet. A “best-in-class fleet” is one that represents the top-tier performance level in its specific industry segment.
