ServiceMaster serves 10.5 million U.S. residential and commercial customers through a network of more than 5,500 company-owned locations and franchised licenses.

With more than 18,000 corporate-managed vehicles, the company must keep its fleet on the road, serving customers, while effectively managing its bottom line.

The company’s brands include TruGreen, TruGreen LandCare, Terminix, American Home Shield, InStar Services Group, ServiceMaster Clean, Merry Maids, Furniture Medic, and AmeriSpec. Core services include lawn care and landscape maintenance, termite and pest control, home warranties, disaster response and reconstruction, cleaning and disaster restoration, house cleaning, furniture repair, and home inspection.

A large fleet, coupled with diverse business units, present unique fleet management challenges. The company is meeting these challenges and has made huge strides in cutting costs while improving customer service since centralizing its fleet management functions in 2002.

ServiceMaster’s fleet department has generated millions of dollars in savings to the company. "Our average return on investment over the past six years has been 128 percent," said Mike St. Clair, vice president of fleet, who joined the company in September 2002.

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Entire Fleet Team is Customer-Focused

The ServiceMaster fleet organization is responsible for managing the seventh-largest commercial fleet in the country. Unlike many other fleet management groups, ServiceMaster’s fleet customers are branch managers, field managers, and branch service managers. These managers, in turn, drive the behaviors and output of the service technicians driving the vehicles.

St. Clair’s 28-person fleet department provides fleet logistics planning for the entire company, including:

  • Oversight and direction for all fleet logistics strategies.
  • Process/network optimization; repair facilities, regulatory, contractual, and policy compliance.
  • Supplier quality management.
  • Technical performance standards.
  • Chassis upfit technical design and standardization.
  • Transportation metrics and standards development and governance.
  • Management of systems to optimally utilize resources while minimizing costs.

The company’s vehicles range from small sedans to SUVs, delivery vehicles, and service trucks.

ServiceMaster’s family of brands depends on its vehicles and delivery systems to meet customer demands in a timely and efficient fashion.

"We are not able to rent substitute vehicles when we have supply chain challenges because of the specialized equipment on them," St. Clair explained.

 

Branch Survey Leads to Improved Customer Service

In January 2004, ServiceMaster fleet began measuring customer satisfaction across the enterprise. Previously, this practice was handled in each separate business unit.

A baseline survey was conducted first, soliciting each branch manager’s opinion on the fleet department’s call-in resolution, its professional and courteous greeting, problem resolution time, request and issues follow-up, as well as overall satisfaction with fleet.

"It validated that we had an issue, so we worked with our corporate IT function to develop an enterprise help desk, which was implemented in Q1 2004," St. Clair said. "We now use Remedy Call Center Management software."

The fleet group also focused on "triaging" all calls that came into the help desk to the appropriate fleet expert in the group, helping increase call-in resolution and problem resolution time.

Today, 94 percent of the fleet’s customer satisfaction survey respondents say fleet has met or exceeded their expectations (a 30-percentage point increase since 2004). And 90.9 percent of respondents, on average, say fleet has met or exceeded their expectations for the past six consecutive quarters.

"Our mission is to provide services that make life easier for our customers and exceed their expectations," St. Clair said.

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Best Practices Enable Huge Savings in Fleet

ServiceMaster’s fleet department best practices include maintenance management, asset management, engineering and design, strategic sourcing, and supply chain management.

 

Maintenance Management. The fleet department’s team of fleet maintenance advisors is based at the call center. A staff of eight ASE-certified team members maintains the call center, which receives calls from suppliers regarding vehicle repairs. The team handled more than 40,000 purchase orders last year.

"We use a balanced approach on choosing which suppliers we use to help repair and maintain our vehicles," said Bob Anno, director of fleet. "National accounts are great, but sometimes they are not available. So we continue to look at our quality assurance checklist and constantly compare price and quality of work."

Maintenance transactions are controlled and approved at the call center, allowing the team to have a tight control on repair cost, while taking the burden off the branch managers’ hands.

The maintenance management group also works closely with Fleet Response, a strategic partner that provides accident management for collision and subrogation.

Administrative Support, including supply chain management, on-time vehicle delivery, and remarketing.

About 1,500-2,000 ServiceMaster vehicles are put into service each year, and the team disposes of 2,000-3,000 vehicles annually.

"We are continually adjusting the size of the fleet as the businesses continue to improve efficiencies," said Greg Boal, director of fleet administration.

Boal treats each branch as an external customer. As each branch makes vehicle requests, he does everything in his power to make it happen on time.

In fact, the group had on-time delivery of 94 percent in 2007, and in just the past seven months, they were on time 100 percent of the time.

"The nature of our fleet is production," Boal said. "This means if they don’t have the vehicle, they can’t generate the revenue; so being on time is critical to our mission."

A new effort in 2007 includes helping support ServiceMaster franchisees. "This way, they can work through us, and we can help them make sure they get the best deal on their vehicles," Boal said.

Engineering and Design, including project management, specification rationalization, and design.

Specification reduction and rationalization is an ongoing goal within the engineering team as members work through each business unit to streamline models.

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This team creates functional specifications for each particular business unit and works with suppliers to develop improved vehicle designs to meet those operational requirements.

Recently, the team, in conjunction with key stakeholders from the Terminix business unit and representatives from Wanner Engineering and the AutoTruck Group, redesigned two Terminix trucks and reduced the cost by more than 18 percent for the pest control truck and more than 60 percent for the termite truck.

"We not only reduced the business unit’s cost, but we also gave them a competitive advantage by increasing vehicle functionality," said Jim Steffen, director, fleet engineering & technical support.

A major focus for the team moving into the future includes reducing the company’s carbon footprint through the use of advanced-technology vehicle systems and designs.

"Reducing environmental impact is critical and strategic for any company and fleet, but in particular for residential customer services companies such as the ServiceMaster family of companies," Steffen said.

The ServiceMaster fleet team is currently pilot-testing a way to eliminate unnecessary engine idling with onboard electric power and an electronic shutoff system, and is testing hybrid vehicle applications to reduce emissions and fuel consumption.

 

Cetaris’ Web Fleet Assistant Brings It All Together

"We needed a partner to help centralize our fleet, as well as a system to integrate everything in fleet management into one repository," St. Clair said. "Cetaris, which hosts our system, enables us to have 100-percent transparency on where our assets are and what they are costing us to operate."

ServiceMaster integrates critical data from leasing companies, national accounts, fuel cards (Comdata), along with third-party maintenance transactions entered by the maintenance call center.

The ServiceMaster fleet team partners closely with the individual business units to determine production needs and strategic marketing plans and translates that information into vehicle solutions, from strategic sourcing through vehicle operation all the way to remarketing and disposal. "We help the business with lifecycle solutions," St. Clair said.

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Cheryl Knight

Cheryl Knight

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Cheryl Knight has more than 20 years of editing and writing experience on topics ranging from advanced technology, to automotive fleet management, to business management.

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