GPS Fleet Management Dollars and Cents(Sense)
It’s Not the Four Dollar Gas Kicking Your Butt
There isn’t much in the transportation news or on a fleet manager’s minds these days aside from the cost of fuel … and the consequent general down turn in business. I would call it as it is, a true recession, even the nibbling’s at the gate of a depression, but George Bush is reading every word of this with Carnivore and he’ll probably have me arrested if I don’t say, "just a minor down-tick".
Politics aside, fuel prices in the US are finally heading toward the reality that the rest of the world has been paying for years. And when you fill up that H2 that seemed like such a bargain last year, it hurts, right in the old wallet.
But fuel costs are only a drop in the bucket that most companies, and government agencies carry around labeled "fleet costs", and (mistakenly) feel is unavoidable.
This article today shouldn’t even be news-worthy. It is, only because it fits under the "man bites dog" area of journalism. There are so many fleets out there, sucking up the operating resources (read profit) of their parent entities that the news of even one moderate size operation putting someone in charge who actually realizes that controlling dollars and cents is not only possible, but ids their job is praiseworthy.
County overhauls car-fleet policies
Harford County will no longer hang on to a 10-year-old car with high mileage and higher maintenance bills. It will consolidate usage of its more than 1,000 vehicles among departments and trim as many vehicles from its fleet as practical.
The new fleet management plan takes effect July 1, with $11 million budgeted for the purchase of 202 new vehicles and to help county agencies make the transition from owners of vehicles and equipment to lessors.
Fleet management gives ownership of the property - everything from cars and trucks to bulldozers and trailers - to the Department of Procurement. Bringing all vehicles under the purview of one department offers a centralized management and better utilization of the entire fleet, said Deborah Henderson, county director of procurement…. read the rest of the Fleet Management article here, I recommend it.
This issue has inspired me to get busy and write a new series of articles on the subject, because this subject is just way too complex for a single blog post. I’ll try to get on a more regular production schedule here. But I can give you the bottom line of the whole series right now … and I speak from nay years experience selling into and letting and monitoring GPS tracking systems contracts in both the commercial and government fleet management areas. Think this through:
In the vast majority of fleet management there really is no fleet management. There is typically a person or an entity with that title but they mostly turn out to be the person who finds the cheapest bids for tires, buys fuel from the lowest bidder, etc. They all too seldom ever have any say in the size, composition or business contributions of the fleet. May be a bold statement, but I can prove it, and I’ll illustrate many examples over the next few articles on how to use fleet management that, especially GPS-enabled fleet management to convert your fleet from a cost center to a profit producer.