Self-Assessment for Fleets

23 February 2010

Fleet leadership

These self-assessment tools, brought to you by the Wales Audit Office, are designed to help you to assess your organisation’s Fleet Management arrangements by answering the question – are you ensuring that your approach to Fleet Management makes best use of resources to support improvements in service delivery?

There are a number of well established principles to effective fleet management which can help to improve service delivery, reduce operating costs and minimise the environmental impact of the fleet. This improvement will help achieve the dual aims of ensuring value for public money and promoting an environmentally responsible transport policy.

The key principles of effective fleet management are to:
• agree a Fleet Management Strategy and keep this under review. The strategy needs to consider fleet management in the context of your organisation’s wider asset management agenda. It also needs to consider joint working with other organisations;
• ensure arrangements for procurement and disposal are robust;
• ensure the fleet is fit for purpose and utilised optimally;
• ensure an efficient and robust maintenance regime including the prompt reporting and rectifying of vehicle faults;
• develop a well-trained workforce which will be able to operate vehicles efficiently and therefore reduce maintenance and insurance costs;
• adopt a co-operative outlook which seeks to share good practice between departments and other organisations;
• consider environmental issues with specific targets to reduce CO2 emissions and embrace appropriate alternative fuel technologies; and
• use ICT to improve fleet efficiency.

Read more on the Wales Audit Office's self-assessment tools.

Click here to download the Basic Self Assessment Tool
Click here to download the Detailed Self Assessment Tool
Click here for the Wales Audit Office's Good Practice Guides.

See Fleet Strategy
See Procurement Strategy and our Funding and Leasing section
See Maintenance Strategy
See Strategy for Running your Fleet and Running Costs Calculator
See Disposal Strategy and Auctions and Disposals in our Remarketing Section

Source: Wales Audit Office

Comments (4)

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Comments

highside - 06/04/2010 15:47

good grief, to think these people are running around auditing government departments! having read the basic and detailed self assessment tools, the only word that springs to mind is 'amateur'. It looks like they tippexed over bits of the 'idiots guide to good auditing of things and stuff' and then wrote in a few buzz words about fleet management. And I have to ask the question 'are their counterparts in england, scotland and northern ireland any better?'. if not, i doubt that even an election will save us.
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Gordonoga - 06/04/2010 17:04
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Gordonoga - 06/04/2010 17:45

Highside's comments seem a little unforgiving as not everyone is as good as the best. Any promotion of assessment or review is useful to encourage others as often too little is done. I have come across many individuals in my career, not only fleet managers, who need to take time out to review their operation but do not have the time, it seems, or sometimes the aptitude to be able to do so. I always encourage people to spend a small percentage of their time to review or “research” their operations or a particular issue and such time is rarely wasted. However there are three requirements for any such reviews. The first is to have the time to carry out the review; no objectives cannot be achieved without suitable resources. The second is to know what to answer, such as to questions like “Is tyre management under control?” (Basic Self Assessment D2); the individual may believe they have everything under control but may not have the experience to know what options are available that need to be considered. The third is having the time afterwards to actually implement the review conclusions. I make no apology for in promoting the use of fleet management specialists such as myself to help in all these processes if suitable help is not otherwise available in-house. Lastly, ISO9000 (Quality Management Systems) requires reviews as part of the process including “continuous assessment”. It is not uncommon in organisations that are accredited to the standard to gloss over this requirement and tools such as the Wales Audit Office self-assessment are a useful aid for internal auditors and external assessors.
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highside - 06/04/2010 21:46

'not everyone is as good as the best' .... geeze, this is the Welsh Audit Office we are talking about here. Normally the national audit offices of the United Kingdom burn people at the stake for failing to uphold high standards in public office, but I'll bet not one fleet manager in the public sector in Wales will be even the tiniest bit singed by using the tools promoted by the WAO. I remember when I were a lad (admittedly Hovis was still delivered by little boys on bicycles then) and, as a rookie auditor in a government department reknown for dispensing enemas to those unwilling to comply with their obligations, it was drilled into me that only six words mattered when conducting an audit - who? what? why? where? when? how? Here we have two 'tools' allegedly meant to inspire public sector fleet managers to self-critique themselves onto a higher plane, but which instead do nothing other than inspire self-congratulation and mediocrity thorough the 'Is' word. Is everything perfect? Why of course! As for ISO9000, call me a cynic but, as I recall, the whole thing is about setting the bar low then aiming to clear it consistently, which you do, because you always set it low enough to make sure you do. Wouldn't it have been better for public sector fleet managers in Wales if the WAO had set out a model approach to fleet management distilled from best practice across public and private sector fleets, then assessed the performance of the relevant public bodies against such a benchmark? To paraphrase the philosopher Rene Descartes, 'I think I am the dog's b*****ks, therefore I am'.
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