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September 7, 2016

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Editor's Analysis & Top Industry News


Your Decisions Drive Your Safety — and Your Career

Women in Fleet Management (WiFM) kicks off the annual AFLA Conference on Sunday, September 18th, with a late afternoon program: Ignite Your Sales Potential – followed by a reception. You won’t want to miss this opportunity to network with so many talented and accomplished women (and yes, men!) in fleet.

When we had the opportunity to interview Kathe Carter, an exemplary “woman in fleet,” we were delighted. With 30 years of experience at the State of Michigan and now COO of Mercury Associates, Kathe knows a thing or two about fleet management. In our interview, she gives us insight into the state of the industry and talks about how Mercury Associates works with fleets who are seeking an independent review of an aspect of their fleet operations.

Don’t forget: NETS’ free, downloadable Drive Safely Work Week tools are now available. The theme of this year’s campaign: “Your Decisions Drive Your Safety.” Indeed they do.

Janice Sutton
Editor in Chief


Thought Leadership

Fleet Marketing – Guiding principles for fleet providers to improve marketing and increase sales.

Fleet Asset Management – Best practices for work truck management.

On Accident Management Learn ways to save money on your fleet’s collision repair costs.

Safety & Risk — Impactful driver safety and risk management tools and techniques.

The Fleet CX Toolbox – Solid steps to implementing and improving fleet customer experience.

The Sustainable Fleet – Strategic approaches to bring about a smarter, cleaner fleet.

BIG Data. BIG Results. BIG Future– We look at harnessing big data to achieve big results using cutting edge technology.

Talent Management – Smart guidelines to help you manage the talent in your workplace.

TCO Trends – Expert View — A global look at fleet total cost of ownership trends.


christiano-jim

VIDEO: PARS’ Fantastic Employees are the Key to Happy Customers

PARS has a lot fantastic employees – who have been with the company for some time, and that’s key to their ongoing success with customers.



VIDEO: Involving Clients in the Process
cunningham-michele
  Element Fleet Reimagines and Rebuilds Its Technology Solutions
 

Element Fleet has been busy reimagining and rebuilding their technology solutions, and their clients have been a very important part of that process.


VIDEO: FMCs and Government Agencies
lauria-paul
  Government Fleets: Too Big a Market to Ignore
 

Government didn’t used to be an attractive market to the fleet management companies, but there are some very strong reasons why that may change.





The Fleet Spot


Screen Shot 2016-09-07 at 8.29.12 AM Increasing Fleet Profitability with Telematics

Do you want to run a more profitable fleet? Read this excellent white paper from Geotab – Fleet Savings Report COI vs. ROI – to discover how to uncover potential savings in the areas of safety, fuel, maintenance, and productivity. By pursuing these savings opportunities, you can increase fleet efficiency and improve your bottom line.

DOWNLOAD THE WHITE PAPER

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webinar Register Now For NAFA’s Next Webinar!

NAFA’s latest webinar session, Shared Best Practice Similarities Between Corporate and Government Fleet Operations will show fleet professionals the best practices that apply to all types of fleet operations. The Webinar will be held September 21st at 12 PM Eastern.

The instructor for this webinar will be Steven Saltzgiver, Senior Associate, Mercury Associates. Learn from a veteran fleet administrator who’s successfully managed and navigated the pitfalls in both large government and Fortune 500 fleet operations.

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This webinar will be held 12:00 PM EST on September 21!

San Diego Fantastic Lineup of Speakers at This Year’s AFLA Conference

You can always count on an truly engaging lineup of great speakers at AFLA’s annual conference, and this year is looking better than ever!

From Navy Seal David Rutherford’s keynote focusing on “a team-oriented lifestyle that is necessary to achieve elite levels of success” to motivational consultant Susan Lund sharing “seven simple accelerators to gain buy-in and drive results.” From Bram Bluestein on “Speaking the Procurement Language” to Christine Cashen’s fun-yet-powerful presentation on “Get What You Want With What You’ve Got,” you really won’t want to miss any of the speakers in this year’s mix.

READ MORE and learn all about this year’s speakers.

nafa-logo NAFA Announces New Way To Earn CAFS® Fleet Certification

Individuals interested in proving their mastery of fleet management now have a new way of doing so through the Certified Automotive Fleet Specialist (CAFS®) program offered by NAFA.

NAFA’s CAFS® program is based on the Association’s Certified Automotive Fleet Manager (CAFM®) program, which tests individuals’ expertise in eight core disciplines of fleet management. The CAFS® program tests an individual’s expertise in four disciplines.

“The CAFS® program has been in existence for several years,” said Phillip E. Russo, CAE, NAFA’s Chief Executive Officer. ”However, in the past, individuals enrolled in the CAFS® program had to choose one of three ‘streams’ that dictated the disciplines in which they were tested. Now, individuals can choose any four disciplines and, if they pass those exams, will earn their CAFS® designation.”

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Fleet Asset Management

By Mike Quimby Senior Vice President and General Manager, Element Fleet Management

Fleet managers have a valuable opportunity this month – a built-in accelerator, if you will – to demonstrate commitment to both their drivers and the communities they serve by focusing on vehicle brake safety.

Sept. 11-17 is Brake Safety Week, an annual effort sponsored by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. Law enforcement throughout North America will inspect commercial motor vehicles and educate the industry about the importance of properly maintaining brakes.

Last year, 18,817 vehicles were inspected as part of Brake Safety Week and 2,321 were placed out of service as a result. That’s 12.3 percent. How will it affect your business if 12.3 percent your fleet is sidelined?

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Let's Uber!

The Economist

“LET’S Uber.”

Few companies offer something so popular that their name becomes a verb. But that is one of the many achievements of Uber, a company founded in 2009 which is now the world’s most valuable startup, worth around $70 billion.

Its app can summon a car in moments in more than 425 cities around the world, to the fury of taxi drivers everywhere.

But Uber’s ambitions, and the expectations underpinning its valuation, extend much further: using self-driving vehicles, it wants to make ride-hailing so cheap and convenient that people forgo car ownership altogether.

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Expert Advice

By Janice Sutton

Kathe Carter is Chief Operating Officer at Mercury Associates, an independent consultancy with a staff of fleet management experts who have an enviable wealth of hands-on management experience and an array of sophisticated analytic tools. We talked with Kathe about some of the more pressing issues confronting fleet managers, one of which is to confidently prove the high value of their fleet operation to senior management.

She says, “If fleets are to control cost and quality, they must look at how they are doing business, regardless of whether they are insourcing or outsourcing the services, and be able to document in concrete ways that the fleet is providing best value services in terms of cost and quality. To do so, fleets need processes to secure information on service delivery requirements that speak to their company needs.

“There is not necessarily a daily need for sophisticated analyses or for various fleet management functions such as replacement planning, or process review. Fleets can augment their staff with the specific skills and tools required for such functions as they are needed.

“Knowing where those resources are, developing positive relationships with the suppliers of these services, and effectively managing them are skills that future fleet managers need to excel in,” she continued.

READ MORE








Fleet Trends & Issues


Will Pedestrians Be Able to Tell What a Driverless Car Is About to Do?

The Atlantic

A fully autonomous self-driving car doesn’t really need a steering wheel, or a rearview mirror, or even windows to get where it’s going.

But the first models are still likely to have them. (And not just because such features could be legally required.)

In the coming years and decades, as the public decides how to feel about autonomous cars, the way that self-driving vehicles appear will be arguably as important as how they function. And people, Americans in particular, have clearly defined expectations about what cars ought to look like.

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The Battle For The Future Of Transportation Seems Imminent

The Huffington Post

Are things about to get ugly in the ride-hailing business?

Pay no attention to the cordial press releases. Google ― sorry, Alphabet ― sure looks like it’s thinking about taking on Uber.

Earlier this week, Google announced that its popular Waze app, which offers crowd-sourced navigation and has 65 million active users, plans to explore a carpooling feature in the Bay Area sometime this fall.

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Google Begins Second Major Test of Carpool Service for Office Workers

eweek

Google tests its rideshare service for office workers in limited mode in the San Francisco Bay area a year after it began pilot tests of an identical service called RideWith in Israel.

Google’s Waze Carpool rideshare service for office workers, which launched in limited mode in the San Francisco Bay area last week, actually marks the second major test of the concept for the company in the past year.

Last July, Google quietly began pilot tests of an identical service in Israel called RideWith for linking people looking for rides to work with drivers headed to the same destination.

READ MORE

Pedestrians: Look Before You Step

The Detroit News

Back-to-school is upon us and with it, more pedestrian traffic, everywhere from suburban side streets to the main drags in college towns.

Already signs with slogans such as “Drive like your kids live here!” are sprouting in my neighborhood and I’ve been noticing more of those little day-glo yellow lawn figures that say “slow” and hold out orange traffic flags as a caution.

If you ever wondered, they are called Kid Alert and sell for $25-$50 at big-box retailers and online In fact, there seems to be quite a thriving industry of eye-catching signage warning drivers to watch out for children.

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Are You Ready to Update?

The Detroit Bureau

Technology could speed up repairs, save time and money for motorists and makers alike.

Stung by a fatal crash that has raised serious concerns about its semi-autonomous Autopilot system, Tesla plans to announce a major update for the technology in the coming weeks.

But unlike a traditional upgrade, Tesla owners won’t be required to visit one of the battery-carmaker’s showrooms. Instead, they’ll have the revised software beamed to their vehicles, much as smartphone makers like Apple use so-called over-the-air, or OTA, technology when it’s time to update their operating systems.

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Mobility Management

By Mike Sheldrick

Without fear of contradiction, it can be said that the next ten years will see greater change to the automotive industry than the last fifty — or even more.

At the extreme, there will be significant numbers of autonomous vehicles. Indeed, we are witnessing several on-the-road, real-life experiments.

More generally, we have begun to think much more deeply about the issue of mobility. Individual car ownership or leasing may be in decline, and we will confront a transportation system combining conventional cars and trucks, autonomous cabs, shared rides, mass transit, and yes, even bicycles and walking.

In that vein, we recently sat down with Dillon Blake, Senior Director of Runzheimer, to talk about how many of these topics affect the age-old question of reimbursement vs. leasing as well as the recent entry of fleet management companies into reimbursement.

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Will SuperCruise Be the Ticket for GM?

The New York Times

When General Motors starts selling a new Cadillac sedan next year, it plans to equip the car with G.M.’s answer to Tesla Motors’ Autopilot.

Like Autopilot, G.M.’s SuperCruise feature will be designed to steer a car for long stretches of highway driving, pass other vehicles, brake for traffic, speed up and change lanes — all with minimal effort by the driver.

The monitoring system, which analyzes images of the drivers’ eyes and head to tell if they are looking forward, will notice if drivers are drowsy, looking down at their cellphones or have turned to reach into the rear seat.

READ MORE








Fleet Management Resources
 
AFLA – Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association
Providing the advanced forum for corporate fleet professionals to network with industry leaders.
The CEI Group Inc.
CEI is North America’s largest provider of fully integrated fleet accident management, driver safety and risk management services.
NAFA Fleet Management Association
NAFA is the association for the diverse vehicle fleet management profession regardless of organizational type, geographic location, or fleet composition.
AmeriFleet
Offering a nationwide vehicle delivery and relocation service; serving the corporate and commercial fleet industry.
Donlen
Since 1965, Donlen has been the fleet management industry’s leading provider of comprehensive, integrated financing and asset management solutions — and that spirit of innovation continues today.
PARS
PARS' mission is to provide you with high-quality service at competitive prices for all of your transportation needs.
ARI
Driven fleet professionals. Driving results.
Driving Dynamics
Driving Dynamics was established to help corporate fleet drivers develop expert, safe driving skills using proven, advanced driving techniques.
Wheels, Inc.
First in fleet for 76 years. Wheels helps you build tomorrow’s fleet today.



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