A 35-year-veteran in fleet management and logistics was interviewed in February, 2016 just before his retirement by Fleet News, and he offers many interesting insights into what fleet management and trucking professionals should be focusing on when it comes to operational best practices and cost-cutting initiatives.
James Langley is based in the UK and worked for PHH Arval for many years and then started his own consultancy called Fleet Intellect. He shared these opinions in a June 2 interview with Fleet News:
“There are, I’m afraid, plenty of fleets which are being managed in a manner very distant from best practice. Policies are outdated or don’t fulfill an organization’s needs and real measurements of performance are not established.
Sadly, there are still too many fleets which have no idea of their total fleet operating costs; have inadequate knowledge of the profile of business and private mileage and many other key measures.
Many businesses see fleet management software as a necessary evil and far too few seek to measure what their fleet is doing compared with what the business is doing.”
Langley goes on to express how important it is for fleet managers and owners to be able to link mileage and fuel usage to actual business activity, which will lead to improvements in route management, individual driver behavior and overall company fleet policy definition and enforcement.
Click here to check out the rest of Langley’s wide-ranging and informative interview.