Car care
Drivers should not be allowed to abuse their vehicles, have crashes or commit road traffic offences, according to Geoffrey Bray, chairman of fleet management company Fleet Support Group (FSG).
“Employers invariably set out their rules and regulations, but they don’t include not having crashes, breaking the law or abusing vehicles,” he says.
“The biggest single influence on vehicle cost is the driver. Therefore, fleet decision-makers should manage drivers or suffer the consequences.”
Photographic evidence collected by FSG’s Masterview system, which is installed in its network of independent garages, repeatedly highlights abuse of vehicles by employees resulting in expensive damage.
When detected, fleet managers in charge of the vehicles are informed and shown the evidence so they can take action. Masterview can then be used to proactively police vehicle condition in the future.
According to Bray, a factor of three divides the safest fleet from the least safe fleet, as revealed by FSG records. He says: “Multiply that by 100 or 1,000 vehicles and that adds up to big amounts of money being lost.
“Pence per mile figures are the most accurate mechanism for monitoring individual vehicle costs. We use a range of key performance indicators and a ‘traffic light’ monthly report format to help customers focus on key issues in a bid to cut operating costs.
“The key to reducing fleet operating costs is driver management so it is vital that ourselves and our customers use fleet maintenance data to manage employees. Many clients have achieved dramatic cost reductions by using data in a more proactive way.”
One client, Home Retail Group, the parent company of Argos and Homebase, has pence per mile operating costs on its company car fleet identical to 1995 at 2.23p with the average maintenance costs per vehicle down by a massive £83 a year. Taking inflation at 2.5% per annum into account it equates to a total saving last year of £344,331 in maintenance costs on the 981-strong fleet.
Transport manager Peter Weston said: “It is amazing that our pence per mile figures are identical to 15 years ago.”
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