Automotive Fleet's 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.
Just as with fleet management, there are many disruptive changes anticipated in the broader discipline of corporate procurement, much of it technologically driven. Many of these changes will directly impact fleet sourcing decisions.
A growing number of employees have been caught using their company vehicles as a tool to generate supplemental personal income for themselves.The fastest-growing trend in unauthorized usage of company vehicles is working as an Uber or Lyft driver. But using company vehicles to moonlight goes far beyond Uber and Lyft.
Some fleet managers have an adversarial relationship with drivers. These internal customers aren’t your nemesis. In order to develop a service mindset, you need to view work from the customers’ perspectives. Define your functions with the customer in mind. The fleet manager is responsible for creating a fleet culture that values all internal customers, even difficult ones.
Many view fleet management as being a desk job, but it is more than that. When trouble-shooting fleet problems, such as increased costs for a particular user group, it is important to identify the root cause, which often requires on-site visual inspection of fleet assets and how they are being utilized.
The strategic procurement process typically involves a multifunctional sourcing team. This cross-functional team often designates a “gatekeeper” responsible for controlling the flow of information to the group. When selecting a fleet supplier, I strongly believe the fleet manager needs to be the gatekeeper. Here are the arguments supporting this assertion.
The fundamental requirements of your business necessitates minimum fleet equipment specifications that, as a result, pre-define the expense parameters from both a fixed and operating cost perspective. If you acquire vehicle assets that best fulfill your fleet application, then any supplemental cost reduction will only be based on incremental refinements The best way to achieve additional cost reduction is by modifying driver behavior.
There are more than 3,000 federal and state laws and regulations prohibiting unauthorized dissemination or access to employee personally identifiable information (PII). However, employee privacy is sometimes inadvertently compromised by fleets. The reason this occurs is because the PII that was electronically captured by the out-of-service fleet vehicle is not deleted.
Change is percolating in the management of multinational fleets, which is being driven by global market dynamics, evolving procurement trends, and technology platform upgrades that are facilitating cross-border management of individual country fleets. Developing the subject-matter expertise of managing a fleet from a global perspective is going to become a core competency for fleet managers at multinational corporations.
As a wear item, tires are a depreciating asset. Your job, as the fleet manager, is to slow the rate of depreciation. Replacement tires as a cost category are a fleet’s second-largest operating expense, exceeded only by fuel. By maximizing tire tread life, you lower per-mile costs, resulting in fewer premature removals and optimizing the condition of tire casings, allowing for multiple retreads.
When I first read articles about the use of drones in fleet operations, I used to roll my eyes. But, no longer. After talking with many fleet managers, I now believe that drones in commercial applications will have a major impact in a variety of industries. At most companies, drone operations will fall outside the domain of fleet, at least initially. As FAA restrictions are eased, drones will proliferate into mainstream business practices, with the insurance and energy industries in the vanguard
My prediction is that autonomous vehicles will create a paradigm shift in vehicle design, whereby interior design will become the primary brand differentiator in the future. What will drive this paradigm shift is that future autonomous vehicle design will focus primarily on the passenger and not the driver. This will create a tectonic shift in vehicle design with ramifications that will take decades to fully play out.
With the increasing demand and growth of the commercial truck and van segments – particularly among utilities and service industries – the percentage of upfitted vehicles is growing. Upfitters are feeling the pressure of increased demand. In recent years, the huge influxes of vehicles needing upfitting have left some upfitters, at times, overwhelmed.
The best way to answer the question of what is the future of fleet is to look outside the fleet industry.Here are six technology trends happening outside of fleet that will have a major impact on the future direction of our industry.
There is a direct correlation between high driver morale and high driver productivity. The converse is also true. The hidden cost of low driver morale has a direct bearing on a company’s bottom line. While low morale is an HR/management issue, and even though fleet managers do not control driver salaries, there are actions that fleets can take to help increase driver morale.
One of the perennial reasons given for order-to-delivery (OTD) delays is rail constraints. This has been an ongoing issue in the U.S., but, now, with the dramatic expansion of automotive production south of the border, rail constraints in Mexico will begin to play a greater role in fleet OTD discussions.
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