Opinion: Why administration remains at the heart of fleet

One of the most interesting discussions at the Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP) annual conference was, perhaps surprisingly, about administration.

In our sector, we’re arguably guilty of spending too much time talking about ostensibly more glamorous topics, from electrification to new market entrants, when administration is central to what we do as fleet managers and certainly forms the bulk of the workload in any fleet department.

If you look at the AFP channels – such as our busy WhatsApp group – where our members seek advice on how to handle difficult issues or bring about improvements in their fleet’s performance, the majority of the questions are about administration in its many forms. These might range from how to process a flood of fuel receipts through to the best way to challenge penalty charge notices. All of these are core to daily fleet lives.

What is impressive is the sheer scale of the task achieved by some fleets. One member of our conference discussion panel, Dale Eynon of DEFRA, explained that his department handled 220,000 financial transactions and 20,000 incoming e-mails every year, as well as dealing with compliance, taxation and more.

This is a massive amount of administration and for him, and every other fleet manager, getting all of it right is difficult but also crucial to keeping the fleet on the road.

It's almost certainly true to say that fleets are dealing with more administration than ever before.

In areas from compliance to accident management to rental recharges and more, documentation is proliferating over time, and this places more and more pressure on fleet managers.

In the worst cases, it’s possible to feel that you are drowning under a flood of PDF files and paperwork, and certainly this is a cause of stress for fleet managers.

Many fleet administration processes require a high degree of manual intervention and in some instances, the only plausible way to handle an increased workload is simply to make more people available to meet demand, whether through redeploying existing resources or, if funding is available, additional recruitment.

The possibilities of this will, of course, vary widely from organisation to organisation.

However, there are other solutions and technology can play a role. For example, adopting a fuel card and consolidating all your fuel receipts into one single monthly invoice can remove a large amount of manual administration.

We’re also starting to see fleets make use of artificial intelligence (AI). While still in its infancy, there are commercially available products that can recognise and allocate invoices, for example.

If you’re dealing with a lot of this kind of documentation, investments in this area could be worthwhile.

Some larger fleets are even employing data scientists to look at patterns in the information being processed and identify where new, more efficient procedures are possible.

The expense means this option is viable for only the most complex vehicle operations, but we hope to see the technology and learnings, cascade down over time.

It’s also important to realise that much can be gained just by talking to other fleet managers about their experiences.

A surprising amount can be achieved in some areas by taking a different approach to administration, and we often hear of new ways of approaching documentation that can save time and effort through relatively simple steps. It’s another area where being part of the AFP can pay very real dividends.

If you are overwhelmed by the prospect of a mile-high stack of documents then you may unavoidably need more people, but our members can often reveal innovative approaches that reduce the administrative burden by a surprising amount.

Taken from the first quarterly edition of Fleet News IQ.