Advertisement feature from Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Businesses and public sector bodies continue to face pressure to reduce costs, cut emissions and make business travel more efficient. Alongside this, the expanding range of travel options has created new pressure to make the best choices in an increasingly complex environment.

Adrian Bewley, head of business mobility at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, has spent years analysing the changing face of employee mobility. He comments: “The same organisation might need to rent an electric/hybrid car for an hour, a 2.0 litre saloon for a day and a luxury vehicle for VIP guests.

“It might also want a van for three months and a refrigerated HGV for a year or two, not to mention insurance replacement vehicles to minimise downtime and keep drivers on the road.
Responding to all these mobility needs from one partner can streamline processes, deliver economies of scale and also reveal new opportunity for driving efficiencies.”

He explains that Enterprise has invested in technologies, extending services and locations as well as in providing analysis and consultancy to enable businesses to take a broader and more holistic view of employee mobility. The purpose is not just the convenience of a ‘one stop shop’. It extends the value of daily rental across much wider areas of the business, solving multiple requirements.

Adrian continues: “You have to understand how, when, where and why your people travel before you start thinking about day rates and rental tenders. We’ve worked with fleets of all sizes to help them analyse travel patterns, driver behaviours and vehicle usage, using data to build a picture of their business travel usage and requirements.

“It’s a complicated, interwoven network of factors, which can include grey fl eet, pool cars, rental, leasing and public transport. Our analysis establishes where rental is not the solution as much as where it is.”

Mapping customers’ requirements from the outset also allows Enterprise to uncover hidden costs such as higher delivery and collection fuel bills from a provider lacking branches in the right locations. Others may have no idea how much they spend on the grey fleet because the fleet manager doesn’t handle drivers’ expense receipts.

“The strength of our branch network, with more than 450 locations around the UK, is one of our major selling points,” adds Adrian “Another is analysing how people travel because it enables us to see where customers need to change their approach.

“By crunching the numbers, for example, we might find that for a particular fleet using a car club vehicle is far cheaper than mileage reimbursement for journeys of less than 75 miles. It can use that information when formulating its transport policy, moving away from unmanaged forms of business travel and towards a solution where it has total transparency and cost control.”

It’s clear that business mobility is a sector that has utterly transformed in recent years, and will only get more complex in the future. Only fleets that fully understand their requirements will see the operational efficiencies that lead to success.

Enterprise.co.uk | 01784 221 300