Fleet Smart

If your company has a sales force of any size – and that means just about any company at all – you could benefit from the fleet services of such professional fleet management organizations as GE Fleet Services, Wheels, Donlen or PHH Arval. These companies can save you time, staff and money while giving you the best in professional fleet management. Professional fleet managers also make sure your cars are maintained correctly, financed affordably and sold at the right time and best price. Cost-effectiveness, intelligence and professionalism: fleet management brings exactly these qualities to the environment where salespeople spend a great deal of their time – in their cars.

Take Owens Corning. The company sells about $5 billion of building materials and insulation for siding and roofing each year, mostly to distributors, contractors and retail outlets. Its sales reps usually work out of their own homes. John Hutchinson, the company’s global sourcing leader, manages a fleet of 625 cars with the help of a fleet management company. Because of other duties, such as managing forklift and environmental vehicles, Hutchinson spends only a fifth of his time on the sales fleet. He has one fleet administrator who spends full time on the sales fleet.

“I can’t imagine trying to manage more than a couple hundred cars by doing it all in-house,” Hutchinson says.

The fleet management company provides finance and leasing, fuel management, maintenance services and accident management. Owens Corning issues fuel cards to its drivers and can thus monitor volume and mileage when drivers fill up. “You can tell if they are using regular, mid-grade or premium fuel and if they are filling up more than once a day,” Hutchinson says. “Without a fleet-management program, I don’t know how you would ever get your hands around that stuff.”

Another benefit of fleet policies is esthetic. “If you just give reps car allowances, some will short-sheet on the car,” Hutchinson says. “This way, we ensure an attractive appearance and that the car is washed, kept clean and maintained regularly.”

Esthetics aside, technology is taking over the business of fleets. For the last several years, the best fleet firms have been offering Web-enabled tools that help firms manage sales fleets much more effectively and help salespeople save time and hassle with their company cars. GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services plans to introduce a custom portal product aimed at improving the experience for both fleet management professionals and drivers, according to Brad Von Bank, product manager for digitization.

The new portal gathers all of a company’s fleet-related information on one site and personalizes the experiences for each driver. “For example, our clients can create their own content, post their fleet policies and encourage compliance with those policies,” Von Bank notes.

This is important because setting and enforcing fleet policies is crucial to reducing costs and maintaining safety.

In the last year, one of the main focuses for Owens Corning’s Hutchinson has been safety. This includes record checks on drivers, online safety education and some behind-the-wheel training. Owens Corning chose Alert Driving (www.alertdriving.com) to run its safety programs. “The main reason was their online training capability,” Hutchinson says. “Our reps are distributed all around the country and work out of their homes.”

His drivers take a safe-driving training module online. Alert also conducts record checks for all drivers. Currently, Owens Corning allows reps’ spouses to drive fleet cars, and spouses are subject to the same record checks and online training requirements as the reps.

Owens Corning allows its reps to purchase their cars at the end of the lease, an option that about 15 percent of them take. Hutchinson is looking at a new Web tool that would allow other Owens Corning employees to buy the cars if the reps don’t want them.

The company recently switched to Ford cars. Reps can choose a Taurus, a Freestar minivan or an F150 pickup truck. By autumn 2004 the company had replaced a quarter of its cars, and it will be a 100 percent Ford fleet by the end of 2005. “Based on the incentives and rebates, it makes good sense to cycle through quickly,” says Hutchinson. His company usually keeps cars for 36 months or 72,000 miles, whichever comes first.

Sealed Air Corporation manufactures and sells a wide range of food, protective and specialty packaging in the United States and 49 other countries. Marianne Garvey manages Sealed Air’s fleet of 600 cars, vans and sports utility vehicles driven by sales and technical reps as well as executives across the United States.

Garvey was the fleet administrator until she was promoted to fleet manager two years ago. In June of 2004, Garvey became an officer on the board of the New Jersey chapter of the National Association of Fleet Administrators (NAFA). Her experience at Sealed Air and information gleaned from her NAFA colleagues has led Garvey to implement many changes in her company’s fleet program. She is planning further improvements.

Garvey likes PHH Arval’s PHH Interactive, which allows Garvey to run special reports on demand or to schedule regular reports to be received via email on a monthly basis. “I can review a general preventive-maintenance report, or I can run a specific report for a manager who may need very detailed information for his or her territory. Either way, the interface is very easy. I can easily get all the information I need online.”

Garvey’s next stop could be the fuel pump – or the Web. GE’s Von Bank suggests looking at, “tier two and three fuel suppliers” that sell gasoline for a few pennies less than major company outlets. While many drivers don’t know which stations are tier two or three, on a GE Fleet portal, managers can post lists of these lower-priced outlets in each region and emphasize the saving potential. “You can tell salespeople, ‘Don’t drive all over town looking for these stations, but if you need gas and you see one, stop in and fill up,’” says Von Bank.

When it is time for a rep to order a new vehicle, the GE portal will notify the rep at login and then automatically lead to the ordering tool to pick the model and color. The driver will be prompted to complete any other work necessary for safe driving. “For example, there is a big movement toward motor vehicle record (MVR) checks,” Von Bank explains. Fleet Services can arrange for the MVR checks, but reps must first give permission for these record checks. The custom portal provides an integrated work-flow tool where the driver can complete that process along with other company car-related activities.

The custom portal has other uses that can enhance safety and protect firms against unnecessary liability. “Within a custom portal, reps can be asked to confirm that they have read and will conform to company policies,” explains Von Bank.The custom portal also helps drivers report their business and personal mileage. The Internet makes it easy to do that, and about 90 percent of drivers in GE-managed fleets already use the Internet to report their mileage, with the remaining 10 percent reporting by phone.

The custom portal is designed to be used for vehicle-related information and tasks. But Von Bank says it could also reinforce other important company messages. “”For example, if you are having an annual sales meeting, you might want to post this information on your custom fleet site, in addition to your company Website.”

More generally, the aim is to make it as easy as possible for the company to manage the fleet and as easy as possible for drivers to comply with company fleet policies. “People ask me about a training program for the site,” Von Bank says. “I tell them, if it requires training (to use it), we have failed. It needs to be intuitive and self-explanatory.”

Beginning in 2000, Fleet Services offered both “push” and “pull” reports on the performance of the fleet to management. “They can sign up for as many as 26 different reports that we push out to them monthly or every other week,” Von Bank notes. About 10,000 managers now get these reports.

Now, it will get even easier. “Our customers have told us they would like to log in and see all the data they need on one page in a dashboard format,” Von Bank says. So this year, Fleet Services is offering a dashboard for managers to check easily. “They can log in, see how the fleet is performing and drill into the detail with a click of the button.”

Fleet Services’ customers can set up the key performance indicators they want to see on their own dashboards, setting the targets and specification limits for effective performance. For example, fleet managers can set a goal of 70 percent national account utilization, and the dashboard will tell them immediately where they are relative to that goal.

The dashboard also makes performance tracking easier. “Rather than running 30 different reports, they can immediately see how they are doing. If they set a limit and their drivers go outside it, the dashboard will reflect that they are out of spec and need to investigate.”

Alerted to problems, fleet managers can then drill down to see where the problems lie and focus on those that fall outside defined parameters, freeing up time for more strategic fleet management and business-related activities.

Fleet Services is working on another product that identifies the best months to sell cars and light trucks to maximize resale proceeds and minimize maintenance costs. Traditionally, fleet cars have been replaced on a regular cycle, determined by months in service or mileage parameters. Fleet Services is now building a tool that predicts the best time for resale within a six-month period based on customized fleet analytics. In addition, the tool helps manage the replacement process with real-time tracking and forecasting. “The model takes into account seasonal pricing variations, maintenance probabilities, and individual unit maintenance history to make unit-level recommendations for customers’ fleets,” says Von Bank.

Scheduled for release this spring, this new product utilizes the vast amount of vehicle specific data and vehicle remarketing expertise at GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services to help customers effectively manage assets and make data-driven replacement decisions.

At Sealed Air, Garvey has set rewriting the entire fleet policy as a priority. She’s been networking with her colleagues at NAFA to understand best practices in the field. For example, Sealed Air will soon be shortening its lease cycles. The company has kept cars in its fleet for 85,000 to 100,000 miles or four years. Now Garvey plans to turn them over at 70,000 miles or every four years, whichever comes first. “We feel this will help us hold down maintenance and repair expenses, driver downtime and short-term rental fees,” she notes, and adds that she strongly endorses the outsourced approach to fleet management. Nevertheless, she cautions that managers should not outsource all fleet functions. “Try not to put all your eggs in one basket. Keep at least a few of the functions in-house, and monitor things closely.”