Automotive Fleet's former editor, Mike Antich, shared his opinions and ideas on the overall commercial fleet industry and draws interesting comments from fleet managers and other industry professionals from across the country. Mike was inducted in the Fleet Hall of Fame in 2010.
Not only is last-mile delivery the fastest growing vocational fleet segment, it is also demonstrating that it will be an early adopter exploiting the technologies and business practices that will become the new core fleet management tools to be employed in the next decade of the 2020s.
To get the pulse of the vocational truck and van market, I reached out to a wide cross-section of fleet managers around the country to find out what’s on their minds. Here’s a snapshot of what they told me.
Understanding the differences between purchasing and sourcing is vital for fleet management specialists who want to maximize the value of their assets.
Strong demand for light- and medium-duty trucks in the 2018 model-year increased order-to-delivery (OTD) times, resulting in widespread upfitter backlogs despite reduced fleet allocation availability due to competing strong retail demand for trucks.
The forecast for the 2019 model-year indicates it will be a strong asset acquisition year for the commercial fleet segment, which is comprised of 6.3 million light-duty vehicles in operation.
When hiring prospective drivers it is important to beware of expunged motor vehicle records (MVRs). Many states have a process where drivers can remove part of their driving record from view, hiding violations from potential employers.
Negligent entrustment lawsuits typically focus on whether the company has an established safety policy and whether it enforces those policies.
The recent U.S tax law changes created a problem for employers who use a non-accountable vehicle reimbursement plan. Negative feedback has some companies reconsidering the viability of offering company-provided vehicles to help key employees mitigate the adverse impact of eliminated tax deduction.
A truck’s total cost of ownership (TCO) covers a specific range of expense variables, regardless of the make or model. The four lifecycle categories that influence TCO are fixed costs, operating expenses, incidental costs, and depreciation/resale value. A key factor that drives these lifecycle categories is a vehicle’s service life.
Most in procurement take the position that fleet’s primary responsibility is to buy assets and services, which annually can range from millions to tens of millions of dollars in expenditures. This amount of corporate spend requires it be managed by someone with superb negotiation skills and proven procurement acumen.
If you want to provide added value to your company, you need to view fleet as a business and not simply an aggregation of assets to be managed cost-effectively. The fastest way to improve your bottom line is to increase fleet utilization, which increases the productivity of each individual truck.
Blog: Vocational trucks are susceptible to being targeted for staged accidents, which involves maneuvering an unsuspecting employee driver into an intentional crash in order to make a false insurance claim or to file a lawsuit against the driver’s employer.
Many upfitters are operating at capacity, necessitating fleets be extra attentive to specifications because any engineering change will even further delay OTD. It is times like today that reinforces the value of advance planning and the creation of fleet metrics to measure progress.
Procurement underperforms in cross-collaboration initiatives with other corporate spend categories, such as Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) and supply-chain management.
We all agree that planning is crucial to the success of any project, but it is especially important when spec’ing a new upfit. Conceptually, most fleet managers will agree with this statement, but it isn’t always followed in actual practice.
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