Lex Autolease is targeting customers who run 500 or more vehicles with a new fleet benchmarking service which, it says, has already saved one company £1.4 million.

The product allows organisations to compare their fleet performance in a wide range of areas against similar operations in the leasing company’s corporate customer base.

This will identify areas where an organisation can improve, as well as ones in which it excels. Lex Autolease can then devise and implement policies or strategies to address any issues.

Key to the product’s success is the size of the leasing company’s risk fleet, said customer relationship manager Andy Barrell. Lex Autolease is the largest leasing company in the country with a risk fleet of around 380,000 – more than double that of nearest rival, LeasePlan.

Barrell said: “Companies are keen to understand how good their performance is from an operational point of view, from a risk point of view and from a cost point of view.

“But all they can compare it to is their performance last year because that’s the only data they’ve got.

“Big is beautiful in terms of data and the scale of our business allows us to have the largest data lake in the industry and also the richest data within that.

“We’ve probably got more vehicles in certain sectors than other people have in their entire fleet.

“We can drill down to a very specific industry sector or even a very specific geography and still have a sample size that is relevant.

“Whether they are a utilities company, a delivery company or a housebuilder, they can see what the cost should be or what their risk profile should look like compared to their peer group.

“Where we find someone who is particularly lagging in a sector we can create the strategies and operational models that allow them to be best in sector or at least on par with the best in sector, and that creates an enormous amount of value for the end-user customer.”

Barrell added there is no cost for fleets to take part in the initial phase of the benchmarking process, but if they decide to progress then Lex Autolease operates a “gain share model”, where the savings are shared with the leasing company.

Lex Autolease launched its benchmarking service in February after a trial period towards the end of 2017 which 10 organisations were selected to participate in.

In the initial phases, Lex Autolease found there was generally a £500,000 difference between the best and worst performers.

Examples of successes are:

• £1.4m of savings for a major retailer by lowering vehicle CO2 emissions, amending mileage reimbursement rates and restricting engine capacity.
• £820,000 savings for a healthcare provider through more efficient management of accidents, motor offences and driver recharges.
• £89,000 savings for a transport contractor by simplifying the range of manufacturers, introducing electric vans and improving the management of end-of-contract damage recharges.

Barrell said as well as using data generated by Lex Autolease, the benchmarking service can also incorporate information such as telematics and fuel data from third parties as long as it is supplied in a compatible form.

He added the service is currently available to the company’s larger corporate customers, but in some instances it could be made available to existing smaller customers and new prospects.