At Fleetwise, we've noticed a growing trend among organisations shifting from dedicated to shared fleet vehicles. This move is particularly prevalent in companies striving for more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly fleets. The transition to a pooled fleet requires some initial effort, but the benefits far outweigh the challenges, offering a more agile management approach to company vehicles.
With over 30 years of experience working with some of New Zealand’s largest pooled fleets, Fleetwise has honed its services, software, and integrations to make this transition seamless for organisations. In this article, we explore the advantages of adopting a pool fleet management approach and how partnering with a specialised Fleet Management Organisation (FMO) like Fleetwise can help you overcome potential hurdles.
What is Pool Fleet Management?
Pool fleet management is an agile approach that centralises the use and administration of shared vehicles within an organisation. Unlike traditional fleet management, which assigns specific vehicles to specific drivers, pool fleet management ensures that the right vehicle is available for the right job at the right time, maximising vehicle availability and utilisation.
One of the main challenges in transitioning to a shared fleet is the lack of a designated driver responsible for vehicle maintenance and compliance. Your FMO must understand this difference and provide the necessary service extensions to manage pool vehicles effectively, reducing the internal resources needed to run your fleet.
Reducing Internal Fleet Management Time
In traditional fleet management, FMOs typically notify you when vehicle servicing and compliance are due. With pool fleet management, Fleetwise leverages an integrated booking system to monitor vehicle availability. This system allows us to schedule service and maintenance events directly within the booking system, coordinating with service agents for vehicle pickup and drop-off. During maintenance, vehicles are automatically marked as unavailable until all work is completed.
This approach significantly reduces the time your staff spend on fleet administration and managing vehicle movements, allowing them to focus on more strategic fleet initiatives.
Prioritise Fleet Optimisation
Traditional FMO models often don't prioritise fleet optimisation, making it difficult for fleet managers to answer critical questions such as:
- Why are so many work vehicles sitting idle in the carpark?
- How many vehicles are available at any given time during the week?
- Can we reduce the number of vehicles in the fleet to cut costs?
A pool fleet management approach provides rich data that drives continuous optimisation decisions. By analysing vehicle, group, and full fleet utilisation, as well as driver ratios, Fleetwise helps ensure that each fleet location operates with the necessary number of vehicles. This data also highlights opportunities to rebalance vehicle locations, ensuring that vehicle mileage is managed within lease budgets and residual values on owned assets are maximised.
A Single Source of Fleet Data
Data discrepancies between your internal fleet information and external FMO databases can lead to frustration and a lack of trust in fleet data and analytics. With pool fleet management, both internal and external parties work from a single dataset, integrating vehicle booking, management, and tracking data into one cohesive database. Consolidated reporting covers all aspects of fleet management, from cost and maintenance information to optimisation and driver behavior trends.
By partnering with Fleetwise, your staff no longer need to maintain core fleet information, and they can trust that the most current data is used when booking vehicles. This ensures that only vehicles with up-to-date servicing and compliance are available for reservation.
Enhanced Driver Support and Faster Issue Resolution
Managing your drivers is just as important as managing your vehicles. Ensuring that drivers have the necessary support and are legally eligible to drive the vehicles assigned to them is crucial for minimising organisational risks.
Fleetwise offers direct software support through our driver support line, helping staff navigate unforeseen vehicle booking challenges as well as mechanical issues. This single point of contact for everything relating to the fleet simplifies support for your drivers, removes pressure from your internal fleet staff and speeds up issue resolution.
Additionally, our pool fleet management approach makes new driver onboarding easy. With Fleetwise's online driver registration forms and NZTA driver checks, you can automatically restrict vehicle access if a driver's license is expired or suspended, ensuring your organisation is always compliant.
Additional Cost Benefits
Beyond the direct cost savings from fleet optimisation, pool fleet management offers several indirect benefits:
- Ensuring that the right vehicle is used for the right trip leads to significant fuel savings. For instance, instead of defaulting to SUVs or utility vehicles, organisations can opt for more efficient options like hybrids, PHEVs, and BEVs for suitable journeys.
- Centralising fleet costs and recovering them from individual departments via internal billing improves cost oversight. Departments also benefit from only paying for vehicle time in use, reducing their overheads.
- Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) can be significantly reduced by shifting the default position from vehicles being FBT-liable to exempt, except for days when they are used for personal purposes.
Many organisations struggle with FMOs focused solely on vehicle finance, often lacking the software, integrations, and service levels needed for a holistic fleet management approach. As an independent FMO fully dedicated to fleet management solutions, Fleetwise offers a hands-on service that ensures pool vehicles are always well-maintained and roadworthy. This contrasts with the traditional FMO model, which often prioritises long-term lease contracts over integrated fleet management services that promote optimisation and efficiency.
Fleetwise are experts in pool fleet management. Over the past 30 years, we've developed and refined our offerings, working with some of New Zealand's largest pooled fleets. Interested in how the Fleetwise team can support your fleet journey? Contact our Sales Team today to learn more.