Managing an in-house sales force means managing all the activities that make sales possible, including recruitment, training, compensation, travel, transportation, and entertainment. Few sales managers have expertise in all these fields. Sometimes it helps to have experts lend a hand in one of the most technical and costly areas, managing the cars that salespeople drive to make their appointments. Full-service fleet management companies can do the job better.

In business for 60 years, Emkay focuses on providing the entire range of fleet services, from acquisition and financing on through many other services such as maintenance, accident assistance, and fleet management, according to Chief Operating Officer Greg Tepas. “All our services are done in-house,” Tepas emphasizes. “We feel it is important to offer the full package internally.”

Emkay can arrange either the open-end leases that are common in most fleets or the closed-end leases that some clients prefer. Most Emkay customers have 100 to 500 vehicles in their fleets, but the company can serve much larger fleets with thousands of cars. It has recently been doing more business with these larger fleets, partly due to growth by long-time customers. Emkay also provides services for fleets down to 40 vehicles on open-end lease and as small as 25 vehicles for closed-end deals.

Most of Emkay’s clients now take all or most of its services, seeking expert help in specialized areas like getting registration done quickly and maintenance done cost-effectively. Clients even outsource the time-absorbing headaches of day-to-day fleet management to professionals with many years of experience. “Typically, our contact in a company has a variety of responsibilities, for example the CFO or VP sales, and fleet management is not this person’s core competence,” Tepas notes. “We have the fleet managers, and we work with our clients to meet their objectives, including the reduction of fleet costs.”

Emkay also offers clients à la carte choices from its many services. For example, accident assistance gives you professional arrangement of repairs, invoice handling, securing alternate vehicles, and coordination of subrogation and recovery of damages. Emkay’s Fleet Dashboard warns clients of “critical alerts,” which show exceptions to your driving policies, such as overdue maintenance. Emkay posts these alerts on the Web so you can make cost-saving corrections quickly. Emkay will even give your drivers a customized manual outlining your general driving policy, explaining how Emkay supports it and noting any distinctive features in areas like maintenance, vehicle records, and accident handling.

To reduce the life cycle costs of each car, Emkay uses Fleet Exchange, an online marketplace that maximizes resale value by selling in the best markets. And Emkay’s universal fuel card is accepted across the U.S. at over 200,000 stations representing nearly 100 gasoline companies. These cards ensure that your sales reps will get the best pricing conveniently and that your company can track fuel purchases easily.

Emkay’s experts in maintenance control have won industry awards for their ability to make sure preventive maintenance is done on time and that repairs are done efficiently. Emkay helps with emergency towing, gets national account pricing on repairs, and ensures that warranties are honored. Overall, your company can cut maintenance and repair expenses by 20 to 30 percent by exploiting these professional maintenance services.

Another hassle for both drivers and managers is mileage reporting of business and professional use. Emkay gives drivers four ways to report their monthly mileage totals: by Website, by email, by a toll-free phone call, or by fax. At the end of the year, or on demand, Emkay sends the client company a report for each driver detailing personal use charges according to Internal Revenue Service rules.

“We will design a program that meets each client’s goals and objectives,” Tepas emphasizes. Emkay is always looking for ways to drive down the cost per mile of sales driving, using industry-wide benchmarks. “There is a tendency to focus too much on acquisition prices, due to manufacturer incentives,” Tepas says. “But to minimize net holding costs, you have got to look at residual value as well.” Emkay has extensive experience in remarketing cars at the end of their leases, giving clients an edge in saving money over the whole life cycle.

Customer service is a specialty of the company, and Tepas is proud that Emkay customer-service staff answers calls from both drivers and managers in 10 to 12 seconds, on average. Relieving the headaches of client executives, exploiting the benefits of full-time professionals, and saving costs overall – that is the core of Emkay’s fleet management approach.

GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services is a global fleet management company that provides the full range of fleet services in the U.S. as well as to companies in Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. GE can take over the entire function of fleet management and administration, consulting with clients only on major acquisition or driving policy decisions. Or it can support in-house fleet management with an array of expert services and technical tools.

One of GE’s most important tools for keeping clients informed of their fleet activities is called my.Dashboard. This application lets managers see exactly what is going on with their sales fleets: fuel use, driving mileage, maintenance transactions, and any violations of company driving policies. In-house managers can use my.Dashboard to run their own fleets if they wish, or to monitor how well GE is doing the job, or maybe a little bit of both.

To make all of this more efficient, GE recently enhanced the preventive-maintenance reporting feature of my.Dashboard. The new version delivers information based on the completion status of preventive maintenance transactions such as oil changes. GE Fleet customers can now analyze and track preventive maintenance over time, thus spotting any late preventive-maintenance transactions that could result in compliance or warranty problems. Or, they can spot preventive-maintenance activities that were done too early, incurring expenses before there was any need to incur them.

The enhanced my.Dashboard shows the trends in preventive maintenance activities, including items such as oil changes and state inspections of vehicles. These trends can be reported by type of vehicle, by distance driven, and by time in service, as well as by business unit, such as sales district and region. Just one click of the mouse shows each manager which of his sales reps are outside the range of timely and cost-effective preventive maintenance.

“This metric will help customers reduce the possibility of an expensive repair, such as an engine failure that could cost $4,000 or more,” says Program Services Manager Eric Strom. “Customers can monitor preventive maintenance transactions and ensure repairs are being done on time.” The compliance monitoring system not only saves money during sales driving, but will also strengthen resale value and thus hold down life cycle costs.

This is just one area where the latest reporting tools can help control costs and improve operations. Overall, my.Dashboard contains more than 80 metrics on fleet operations, all the way from the initial order of the cars through every aspect of driving to the final resale transaction. These are the same metrics that professional fleet managers use to design and implement best-practice fleet policies. With my.Dashboard, GE customers can see how it is being done or do some of it themselves, if they choose.