Although unscheduled maintenance increased due to extended service lives, prolonged inactivity during the COVID lockdown, and longer downtime due to parts shortages, costs were flat as vendors refrained from price increases.
The COVID-19 pandemic divided the fleet market into essential and non-essential businesses, causing hundreds of thousands of company vehicles to sit idle from mid-March to mid-May. The economic shutdown caused miles-driven to plummet.
One trend that is gaining momentum among commercial fleets during the pandemic is the use of mobile maintenance vendors. There has been a substantial uptick in fleet requests for mobile maintenance solutions as fleet managers look to minimize downtime and the administrative burden of taking their vehicle to a repair shop and having the driver wait.
Yogi Shivdasani was honored with the Fleet Executive of the Year award at the 2020 AFLA NextGen Conference for implementing data and scalable processes to make his fleet run more efficiently.
Ensuring clear communication within and outside of Fleet Response, Varner takes a professional approach to engage and communicate with fleets.
The most difficult part of implementing fleet telematics is making the case for it to company leadership. Focus on potential ROI to make the decision a no-brainer.
The Fleet Executive of the Year award, along with the Edward J. Bobit Professional Fleet Manager of the Year award, will be announced at the 2020 AFLA NextGen Conference, which will be hosted virtually this October 5-7, 2020.
As companies look for best practices and opportunities to create more efficiencies in fleet management, they should also look at the trend away from vehicle ownership to develop tools to apply in context of commercial fleets.
Although prices for replacement tires increased 3% per unit per month in calendar-year 2019 compared to CY-2018, the per transaction tire costs were up less than 1% for fleets buying at pre-negotiated national account prices.
Average repair cost per unit increased in 2019, primarily due to higher labor rates. Also, PM costs were up as more units require more expensive synthetic oil. Tire price per unit, on average, increased 3% in the past 12 months.
Companies such as Manheim and ADESA have invested time and money to bolster the digital side of their business to meet the demands of this growing field, and so have fleet management companies.
Online remarketing has been a growing trend for the past few years and it promises to continue. As more remarketers are selling and buying wholesale vehicles online, some new trends have emerged.
The automotive world was a part of Don Miller's life professionally for more than 45 years. Miller has always been a car guy, so even in his retirement, he still surrounds himself with all things automotive.
Telematics, Big Data, AI, driver safety, and overall corporate sustainability goals are some major aspects of fleet that managers are continually assessing when considering the latest advancements in technology.
With the cost of fuel representing 60% of the total fleet budget, fleet managers are looking for opportunities to reduce expenditures ranging from rightsizing, route optimization, telematics, personal use, and modifying driver behavior.
