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Dr Paul’s Guide to Fleet Management
Cars are the number one environmental problem facing the world,
but as a society the problem just keeps going into the too hard
basket. After all, how could we ever live without cars?
The reality is that cars are much more than a form of transport,
and that’s what makes them difficult to deal with. Cars
are about personalities, about egos, and about status. The
problem for businesses and organizations is, however, why should
you be spending lots of money on a whole bunch of personal stuff
that’s got nothing to do with the organizational goals?
Be honest, is your fleet there because you desperately need it,
or is it there to meet a long list of ill-defined and ultimately
rather questionable wants and desires from within the organization?
Energy efficiency in fleet management is about having a fleet that
works to directly to support your organizational goals rather than
having lots of cars that are there to make people feel good.
I’ve been involved in a fair bit of research on fleet management
and energy efficiency issues, and the most overriding finding is
that the industry is full of garbage on the subject of energy efficiency.
Sorry guys, but it’s true. If you want to make a significant
impact on fleet costs and energy use you have to be prepared to
ignore the garbage and work on the three issues that actually matter,
being:
Less cars
Cars cost money and use fuel. If you want to save money on
fleet, then get rid of cars, and make the ones you retain work much
harder. If they are sitting around the car park half the day
then they are wasting money and are also a temptation for staff
to take them on non-work trips.
Smaller cars
I have heard every reason under the sun as to why people need big
cars, and except for a few genuine cases they’re all rubbish.
Big cars are often a cultural thing and I can certainly vouch for
the fact that (for instance) New Zealand fleets seem to be happy
to use 1.5 litre and smaller vehicles to do exactly the same tasks
that Australian fleets wouldn’t even contemplate using anything
less than 3.5 litres for. Smaller cars use less fuel, and
that’s that.
Less kilometres
Unless you are a courier, driving is not productive time.
We have email, phones and video conferences that can help us avoid the need
to travel altogether. We have public transport that, in most larger
cities, is no slower than driving and doesn’t have the parking
hassles. And, surprise surprise, we still have those funny
leg things that can walk or even (heavens forbid!) cycle us to a
destination. Less kilometres travelled means less fuel used,
which means less cars needed.
Now there’s lots of other things you can do in relationship
to fleet management energy efficiency, but if they aren’t contributing
to the achievement of these three goals, they are a waste of time.
I could write pages on this, but rather than boring you, I have
made some bullet points of key actions to consider:
Abolish all your personal use vehicles
If you are providing staff with vehicles primarily or totally for
personal use, you are forcing them to decide to have a vehicle.
In most cases, this means you are also forcing them from any form
of alternative transport, or even from sharing transport with their
partner. Personal use should be a personal decision and have
nothing to do with your vehicle fleet. After all, you have
a business to run, not a personal car dealership. Reduce your functional fleet until there’s not quite enough
vehicles
A well utilized vehicle will be running around 40,000 km per annum.
At that level, the vehicle is pretty much in use all day.
This means you get the most out of your money and it also discourages
stray personal use. By contrast, many fleets run vehicles
at around 15,000-20,000 km per annum, which means that they spend
an awful lot of time parked. That’s a lot of money to
have sitting around doing nothing! If you run out of vehicles
for a couple of days, just rent some. It costs a lot less
than having spare vehicles sitting in the car park for the rest
of the year. Abolish or severely limit home garaging
Giving a staff member a car to drive home to garage at night is
one of the most problematic common fleet practices. In general
what happens is that the staff member starts acquiring a feeling
of ownership for the vehicle, which gradually makes it impossible
to get rid of the vehicle if its work justification vanishes.
Net result? A whole car park for of gleaming fleet vehicles
that never do anything other than drive to and from work.
If you have to home garage, review it so regularly and under such
strict rules that no-one ever gets the chance to become attached
to the vehicle. One better, find some secure parking and leave
the vehicles at work! Buy smaller cars
Some horrendous percentage of work trips will be with only one
person in the vehicle. For trips like this you need…….a
very small vehicle indeed. And don’t try to tell me that
you need to have a big car for safety, because size is no guarantee
of safety (and presumably if one takes this to the extreme one would
have to argue that we should all be driving armoured personnel vehicles
and tanks). Smaller cars costs less to buy and less to run,
end of story, and anything that’s sold in Australia meets the
design rules and thus meets the only regulatory safety standard
you can refer to. In Australia there has been a historical
situation where locally manufactured gas guzzlers had remarkably
good economics because of heavy fleet discounting but this just
doesn’t wash any more. If your fleet leasing company
won’t offer you competitive deals on small cars, go to a different
leasing company. Pool all vehicles
We tend to buy vehicles for the worst possible event. Thus
a four wheel drive is bought because once in a blue moon someone
wants to go off road…..and then for the other 364 days of the
year, it drives around town. By pooling vehicles you can save
heaps of money by getting the maximum use out of the additional
investment required for specialist vehicles, while using smaller
and more economic vehicles for the bulk of day-to-day travel.
Pooling all vehicles is also the only way you will be able to get
the maximum use out of your vehicles, because few drivers actually
need to travel 40,000 km in a year for work. Drive less
Identify what the major travel generators are for your work and
see which ones you can eliminate or divert from car use. Hand
out public transport passes and encourage public transport use for
work travel. Penalise use of the work car park. Make
sure that if five people go to a site, they go in one car not five.
Ban mobile phone use while driving, it’s dangerous.
Here are some things that you shouldn’t waste too much time
on if you want to make significant changes in fuel efficiency:
Driver training
There are some terrible drivers out there who genuinely need and
will benefit from training. There are also professional drivers
out there who treat driving as their profession and who will pay
attention to training. But for the vast majority of drivers,
driver training makes stuff all difference to fuel use. You
would be much better off just putting them in a smaller car (or
on a bus). Monitoring and benchmarking
OK, so you need to watch out for people pilfering fuel, but in
the main the data you get from standard monitoring of fuel use is
of shockingly bad quality and just isn’t cost effective to
monitor on a regular basis. And at the end of the day, what
do actually learn from it? In general, there is nothing revealed
in this type of monitoring that you could not have established by
careful consideration of published fuel use data for vehicles.
Most fleet managers have much better things to do with their lives,
like run an efficient fleet. The benefits of detailed data
analysis just doesn’t measure up to the effort required. Creating the fleet as a service unit
It’s a popular myth that maximum business efficiency occurs
when everything is in well defined cost centres. Unfortunately
in fleet management, what this does is create a unit that exists
to maintain a fleet to keep itself in employment. One worse,
there’s a good chance that it’s performance will be assessed
on the basis of keeping its customers happy ….by providing
them with cars. Fleet management needs to service corporate
goals rather than become a service for pampering of fragile egos
with ever better cars. Jumping when the staff tell you to
Cars are a great focus for all sorts of personal agendas, and you
can be assured that if you remove cars or make them smaller or less
sexy, someone will complain. Our research has demonstrated
that there’s only one effective way to deal to this.
Explain gently why you did what you did, that it’s the same
for everyone else, and if they still complain, either ignore them
or tell them to get a life. Cruel I know, but anything else
will just prolong the pain.
Fleet managers are generally victims of circumstance. If
the management of your organization isn’t convinced that they
want to do something about addressing fleet costs, then all the
fleet manager can do is obediently dish out cars for fear of engendering
negative press from the staff. Thus if you want to get serious
about fleet efficiency, then you have to start at the top.
Getting the boss to get rid of his/her car (or at least make it
a lot less expensive) sends a great signal to staff. But most
important is that the boss needs to be convinced that cutting the
fleet back is a good thing for the organization. From there
on, everything else becomes much easier, because at the end of the
day, any complaints can be referred up the line without fear of
losing support. This suddenly turns the fleet manager from
being a passive functionary to becoming a powerful defender of the
corporate good. In my experience, this transition can be quite
scary to watch (mild mannered fleet manager becomes rampaging monster,
there’s nowhere safe to park!), but many fleet managers manage
to make the change very effectively. After all, it’s
really a promotion in authority.
Fleet management is a very conservative profession, and everyone
is scared to be seen to be stepping out of line. However,
I have seen precedents for just about every one of the practices
outlined above. People have done it and lived to tell the
tale – generally with a lot more money in the back pocket at
the end, too. Abolishing the fleet? Yup, one company
did it and saved $3m per annum! Banning home garaging?
Yup, an in one case it cut the office fleet from nine cars to one.
Getting rid of the boss’s car? Yup, I did that once and
he still talks to me…..occasionally. And when I set up
Exergy, I didn’t give myself a car – I’m much happier
taking the bus or cycling.
Saving energy in fleet is easy as long as you are prepared to take
a few knocks along the way. But it’s worth every cent.
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