UK COMPANIES are potentially wasting millions of pounds through lack of management control of their company car fleets. The precise sums being lost are incalculable simply because many organisations are failing to keep even the most remote tabs on their fleet policy.

The Tolley Swan National Survey of Company Car Schemes 1997/98 has revealed almost one-third of organisations (32%) use no method to monitor vehicle running costs. 'Operating cost monitoring has been one of those areas to which much lip service has been paid in the past, but not all organisations have been as active as they might in terms of collecting data, let alone monitoring it and acting on the data which has been collected,' said Peter Cooke, report author and director of the Centre for automotive Management at Henley Management College.

He added that the simple installation of off-the-shelf information technology packages to gather information, combined with exception reporting, would give fleet operators an immediate handle on the wholelife costs of their vehicles. In total less than half (48%) of all fleets maintain detailed records for each vehicle, although this figure rises to 61% for fleets with more than 500 company cars.