By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

As any great salesperson will tell you, sales is not about a great product or service, it’s about the customer’s perception of value.

For fleet decision-makers, value is helping to maximize the contribution of the fleet to corporate strategic goals as well as the savings derived from controlling costs.

The more meaningful the value story, the better the chance that a fleet service or product provider can begin or move along the sales process with a fleet decision-maker.

Even if the company has been an industry leader for 100 years, insists that every manager earn a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, regularly wins prestigious “Best of” awards, and reports fantastical total customer savings every quarter … even with all of that, the ability to differentiate the value proposition — in terms that are meaningful to the customer – is the real key to winning and keeping business.

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Harvard Business Review

Are companies seeing any value to their investments in “big data”?

I’ve been surveying executives of Fortune 1000 companies about their data investments since 2012, and for the first time a near majority – 48.4% — report that their firms are achieving measurable results from their big data investments, with 80.7% of executives characterizing their big data investments as “successful.”

Survey respondents included Presidents, Chief Information Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, Chief Marketing Officers, and Chief Data Officers representing 50 industry giants, including American Express, Capital One, Disney, Ford Motors, General Electric, JP Morgan, MetLife, Nielsen, Turner Broadcasting, United Parcel Service, and USAA.

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By: Elise Hardy, RVP, Material Handling Equipment Sales, Element Fleet Management

Fleet management often presents a complicated puzzle, especially when it comes to material handling equipment (MHE), such as forklifts, pallet jacks and scissor lifts. Every operating environment is different, with various equipment applications and needs.

Managing your MHE fleet and acquiring new equipment doesn’t have to be scary. You can put together the pieces of the puzzle with a few key considerations:

How will the equipment be used?

Your first step in purchasing or leasing equipment is to assess how it will be used, where it will be living, and how many assets are required to move products into the hands of your customers. Be careful not to overestimate your equipment usage. You may end up paying more than you should. The Material handling experts at Element can conduct on-site visits to gain an understanding of your operating environment and needs.

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ABC Action News

The City of Tampa spends millions of dollars each year maintaining and replacing its fleet of more than 2,500 vehicles.

But the I-Team has learned hundreds of cars and trucks were hardly driven, and we went to City Hall to find out why.

The fleet keeps thousands of city employees moving, from police and fire units responding to emergencies, to hundreds of  vehicles used for things like trash collection, water service and park maintenance.

But a recent city audit determined 27 percent of Tampa’s motor vehicles weren’t moving much at all….driven less than 4,000 miles in a year.

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Technology Review

Apple’s desire to build an autonomous car is no secret, but until recently it’s been hard to unearth many details about its research.

Now that’s changed, and what we’ve learned suggests that Apple is firmly on its back foot.

In the middle of April, the California Department of Motor Vehicles granted Apple a license to begin testing autonomous vehicles on the state’s highways. It was pretty late to the show—29 other companies have already started testing driverless cars there. But knowing Apple, it could have developed a killer product behind closed doors and then wowed the world with a big reveal.

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The Gazette

As his vehicle took a turn in “aggressive mode,” Josh Whitley’s hands hovered near the steering wheel but never touched it.

The car, an autonomous research development vehicle from AutonomouStuff, didn’t need Whitley’s help.

Earlier in the day, Whitley had driven the vehicle — a red, modified Lincoln MKZ — around a pre-defined track in Water Works Park here. Along the way, he dropped digital breadcrumbs so the vehicle could learn the path it would soon take as Whitley showed off the technology to attendees of this year’s Global Insurance Symposium.

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Holman Parts Distribution® was named to NJBiz’s 2017 Best Places to Work in New Jersey list, coming in at number 53 among small/medium-sized companies.

The Best Places to Work in New Jersey awards program recognizes and honors the state’s top employers who show a dedication to their employees’ professional growth and quality of life.

“Being named to NJBiz’s Best Places to Work in New Jersey is a tremendous achievement for our company, one that I hope our employees take great pride in because they are the ones this honor truly belongs to,” said Anne Williams, president, Holman Parts Distribution.

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Wired

In Elon Musk’s fantastic vision of the future, cars will drive themselves—when they aren’t being whisked through the vast networks of tunnels he envisions beneath the world’s cities.

Musk, who started digging a big hole on the SpaceX campus near Los Angeles earlier this year, proposes using these underground roadways as a new kind of highway system.

He pitched this idea Friday morning at TED, where extreme wealth meets extreme optimism in the power of technology to solve all the world’s ills.

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By Mark Boada, Senior Editor

Fleets that assign sedans to individual employees are vastly oversized and could be reduced by 50% by adopting car sharing with no loss of service.

So says Julian Espiritu, managing director of Abrams Carsharing Advisors. The 28-year veteran of the car rental and car sharing industries made that remark in a wide-ranging interview with Fleet Management Weekly on the fastest-growing means of obtaining access to an automobile.

Espiritu was one of the pioneers at Zipcar, the world’s largest car sharing company, and since joining Abrams has consulted on dozens of car sharing ventures for business fleets, large and small.

“The old sedan fleet model is to assign a vehicle full time to every employee who needs access to a car,” he said. “And every time I’ve seen a car sharing program adopted in a corporate environment, in a short period of time they find they could have reduced their fleet by half, even if all of their cars are assigned.”

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National Safety Council

​Incomplete data is hurting efforts to save lives.

The National Safety Council examined police reports from 50 states and Washington, D.C., to determine what data states are tracking with regard to motor vehicle crashes.

NSC found that no state fully captures the data required by government and traffic safety organizations to understand the real causes of crashes and effectively address the problems.

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