But even if a company decides they no longer need a fleet department as a result of outsourcing, they will still need a senior member of staff with fleet experience to manage the relationship and consider fleet strategy.

“It’s not fit and forget,” says Tony Stephens, project services manager at Miele (which has outsourced fleet management to CLM for the past 10 years).

“You have to keep an eye on what’s going on and maintain the standard.”

Companies such as Miele and Siemens (see case study) do this through regular telephone contact with the supplier and review meetings.

It’s important to outline process and responsibilities from the outset.

“The client could end up doing half the work when they are paying for a full outsource solution,” Wentworth-James says. “So you need to map out responsibilities.”

Some companies have also found that if they set authorisation levels too low (for authorising a repair, for example), they receive frequent phone calls which doesn’t relieve the admin burden.

But get it right and outsourcing can free up time to focus on fleet strategy.

Paul Tate, commodity manager at Siemens, says: “The difference between a fleet department and me is that I’m not ‘digging in the weeds’.

"I ask Lex Autolease for the information, they do the investigating and I can look at the top level and be more strategic.”

Graham Hine, who does the day-to-day running of the University of Warwick’s fleet acknowledges the benefit of outsourcing. “I do sometimes get bogged down with problems and the operational aspects of fleet,” he says.

But there are some elements of fleet management that can’t be taken away.

“If you outsource, you don’t outsource the risk,” says Paul Tate, commodity manager at Siemens.

“We have board buy-in; they know the liability still sits with us.”

However, a fleet management company can help to manage duty of care by doing licence checking, vehicle checks and driver training programmes.

Outsourcing could also backfire if a supplier is chosen which doesn’t match the company’s ethos.

“Finding the right partner with a team that understands and cares about a client’s business and acts in its best interests at all times can be a difficult process,” says John Catling, chief executive of FMG.

It may make sense to pass fleet management to the existing leasing provider who already understands the company’s business.

Lesley Slater, brand director at LeasePlan, says the advantage is having “expertise under one roof”.