FleetManagementWeekly AmeriFleet
January 26, 2016

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Editor's Analysis & Top Industry News


Innovations Driving Value

We were keen to learn more about Wheels’ newly inaugurated integrated solution for fleets that have both leased and reimbursed drivers. Wheels’ president Dan Frank says: ‘The Wheels Reimbursement Program allows clients to provide the optimal solution for each employee and is at the forefront of industry-leading innovation.”

Last month, Reinier Willems, International Marketing Director at LeasePlan International, showed us how data-driven insights help drive global fleet management value. This month, Willems follows up with a piece on how to turn that insight into action and effect fleet policy and bottom line benefits.

On the topic of far-flung fleets: The International Fleet Meeting — March 2nd in Geneva!

Enjoy this issue and check with in with us for daily updates at: FleetManagementWeekly.com

Janice Sutton
Executive Editor


Thought Leadership

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

Fleet Asset Management – Best practices around managing material handling equipment.

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

The Fleet Customer Experience – Identifying the practices that define the best customer experience.

Think Global. Plan Local. – Navigating the management of the world-class fleet.

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.

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

All posts from the newsletter reside on our web site, FleetManagementWeekly.com


brian-wright

VIDEO: Managing Preventative Maintenance Compliance

Managing preventative maintenance compliance is really about managing appropriate driver behavior. The good news is that Donlen provides the tools and technology to make this whole process easier.



VIDEO: The One Second Advantage
liggio-art
  Goal #1: Helping Drivers Avoid Dangerous Situations
 

Driving Dynamics has pioneered a curriculum based around the One Second Advantage, which allows drivers to see farther ahead and identify potential problems. And now, their Level 2 courses are taking driver training a step further.


VIDEO: Used Vehicle Values
kontos-kommentary
  Kontos Kommentary — December 2015 Edition
 

Tom Kon­tos, EVP, Cus­tomer Strate­gies and Ana­lyt­ics at ADESA, pro­vides expert insight and updates on used vehi­cle mar­ket conditions.





The Fleet Spot


afla-logo Leadership Safety Coaching at AFLA Regional Forum

Join AFLA in Tampa, FL on Thursday, February 25, 2016 for the third annual AFLA Regional Forum, Register Today!

This year’s forum has a great schedule of speakers including, Art Liggio, President of Driving Dynamics Inc., who will present Leadership Safety Coaching. In this session, Art Liggio will break down the barriers of communication between a supervisor and team member on vital safety issues which directly put the driver at risk.

READ MORE

Education NAFA’s EFMS Seminar Touts Powerful All-New Format and Features

Register Now! Early Bird Savings End on February 5th!

The fleet profession can be daunting for those who are new to the industry. With an all-new focus on the 11 Essential Elements of fleet and a highly experienced forum of experts, NAFA’s Essentials of Fleet Management Seminar (EFMS) brings together a comprehensive perspective/picture of what a fleet manager does, and provides the education to do it even better.

The EFMS event on February 23-25, 2016, in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas is the only live-in-person seminar scheduled for 2016.

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training Driving Dynamics Offers New Light-Truck & Trailer Safety Training Course

Driving Dynamics Inc. announced today that classes are now being scheduled for the company’s new behind-the-wheel light truck and trailer course. This employer-dedicated course is designed for individuals whose job requirements include hauling a trailer—even if based on the equipment, a commercial driver’s license is not required.

“Operating articulated vehicles represent increased risks for drivers and greater regulatory scrutiny that requires specialized handling, documentation, equipment, and safety measures. The DOT safety components included in this course provide essential, proven safety procedures that all drivers should be aware of and able to implement,” said Art Liggio Driving Dynamics’ President.

READ MORE

cei-workshop-image Global Fleet Driver Management Workshop 2016

Save the Date: March 9-11, 2016

Topic: The Keys to Implementing a Global Fleet Safety Program

Companies with multi-national fleets know that a global fleet safety program is the best assurance of lower accident costs, less risk of negligent entrustment liability, and fewer high-risk drivers. They also know the many obstacles in implementing a program. This year’s Global Fleet Driver Management Workshop brings together top safety experts to explain how any company can successfully implement a global fleet safety program.

Learn more about the Global Fleet Driver Management Workshop

Think Global. Plan Local.

By Reinier Willems, International Marketing Director, LeasePlan International

In our last blog post, we talked about how data-driven insights help drive global fleet management value. But getting a hold of those insights is only the first step.

To actually start getting value from them, you need to turn this knowledge into action. So what skills do you need to do this? And what’s the best way to get them?

Turning insight into action
When we talk about fleet value, we’re not just talking about direct savings. Putting your insights to use can help you improve productivity, increase vehicle and driver uptime, and keep valued employees on board. That’s real fleet and business value.

READ MORE

 
The Fleet CX Toolkit

By Wendy Eichenbaum

A/B testing is an effective and cost-efficient way to test new ideas in order to create a better customer experience and meet your metrics, but you must consider this data in the overall customer experience.

Back in 2007, a presidential campaign experimented with different versions of the main image and button label on the campaign website’s splash page. They ran a multivariate experiment, showing different combinations of 6 main image and 4 button label options, a total of 24 combinations.

Each visitor randomly saw a different combination, and the site tracked if users signed up.

The winning combination had a sign up rate of 11.6%, compared with the original version, which had a 8.26% rate. That was a 40.6% improvement, which the campaign calculated yielded an additional 2,880,000 email addresses, and those addresses led to an additional $60 million in donations.

Pretty impressive for one image and button label.

READ MORE

 
A Smart New Reimbursement Solution

Wheels, Inc. has become the first fleet management company to offer a comprehensive reimbursement solution to its clients.

“Many of our clients have varying transportation and driver needs in their fleet – leasing may work best in some applications, while reimbursement may work better in others.

“Seasonal work, medical exceptions, new hires, startup initiatives, low mileage drivers, cultural issues or acquisition of a company with an existing reimbursement program are some of the reasons we’ve found clients may choose reimbursement for a segment of their employees,” said Dan Frank, president of Wheels.

“The Wheels Reimbursement Program allows clients to provide the optimal solution for each employee and is at the forefront of industry-leading innovation.”

READ MORE








Fleet Trends & Issues


Telematics 101: Cutting Through the Jargon to What You Need to Know

Equipment World

If you’re confused about all the tech-speak surrounding the topic of telematics, you are not alone. Equipment World asked Dan Stamford CEM, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject to clarify what a contractor or fleet manager needs to know to get started using telematics.

• What is telematics?

Dan S: Think of it as a conduit that takes information from your vehicle or equipment and sends it to a website where you can view it.

READ MORE

Toyota Eyes Satellite Antennas for Data-Hungry Connected Cars

Wired.com

Of all the high-tech, luxury-inducing features available in today’s cars, one of the most popular is a 4G LTE connection that can turn any vehicle into a rolling hotspot. After all, consumers are always demanding more from their data.

Navigation systems offer increasingly detailed information, backseat entertainment systems pioneer new ways to keep the kids quiet, and with systems like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, portable devices need to deliver ever more information.

READ MORE

No Parking Here

Mother Jones

You’ve heard how robocars are going to upend the economy. But have you thought about what they’ll do to urban space?

A 2011 study at the University of California-Berkeley found that the United States has somewhere close to a billion parking spots. Since there are only 253 million passenger cars and light trucks in the country, that means we have roughly four times more parking spaces than vehicles. If you totaled up all the area devoted to parking, it’d be roughly 6,500 square miles, bigger than Connecticut.

Social critics often complain that the interstate highway system deformed the United States by encouraging sprawl. But the metastasizing of parking has had equally profound effects. On an aesthetic level, it makes cities grimly ugly. Economically, it is expensive to build. A study by the Sightline Institute found that at least 15 percent of the price of rent in Seattle stemmed from developers’ cost of building parking.

READ MORE

Connected Fleets on a Collision Course

Material Handling & Logistics

There is a lot of buzz around connected vehicles, and for a good reason. The size of the business opportunity is huge. Navigant estimates that pure revenue from connected vehicle systems is expected to grow from $96.3 million annually next year and to $36.6 billion by 2025.

In addition to improving road safety and fuel consumption, connected vehicles can improve productivity for fleet management. Trucking is a huge industry which is vital to the US economy, so anything that improves its efficiency has a big impact. Nearly 3 million heavy-duty vehicles move approximately 70% of the nation’s freight, about 9.2 billion tons annually, according to the American Trucking Associations.

READ MORE

No More Speeding Tickets?

The Washington Post

One of the big benefits of driverless cars is that they aim to promote safety on the roads while reducing congestion at the same time. If cars are largely run by computers, talking to each other, they can travel closer together in a more coordinated fashion without fear of causing a fender-bender.

Those machines could obviously malfunction. But on the whole, driverless cars are known to behave more cautiously than their human operators. And by virtue of their, well, virtues, autonomous vehicles won’t know how to speed, run red lights, park illegally or make other traffic violations that would result in a ticket. And that could drive some city budgets into a deep hole.

READ MORE

 
Fleet Asset Management

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

It’s no secret that trucks are high-cost assets and it’s crucial to maximize their value to your company.

Operating a cost-effective and efficient fleet requires insight into the total cost of ownership. For example, a good maintenance-tracking program is required to identify maintenance and downtime. When it comes to trucks and total cost of ownership (TCO), the following are key factors to consider:

Get the most out of your trucks
Every truck in your fleet should be maximized. Review acquisition-optimum truck specifications for operational and secondary market risk requirements. It’s also important to identify the vital key performance indicators for measurement, including cost per mile (CPM), miles per gallon (MPG), uptime and downtime. Be sure to identify and match the expense with utilization of the asset.

READ MORE

 
Drowsy Driving

Motherboard

In the middle of the night in June, 2011, Anthony Dedrick could barely keep awake while driving his freight truck from South Dakota to Los Angeles.

He worried about meeting his fast-approaching deadline. He drove 11 hours straight the day before, and though he tried to sleep he managed only to get in a few hours. He finished his last cup of coffee, kept the air conditioning on and bought No-Doz—anything that would keep him awake. He was tired, and he knew it.

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.
PARS
PARS' mission is to provide you with high-quality service at competitive prices for all of your transportation needs.
AmeriFleet
Offering a nationwide vehicle delivery and relocation service; serving the corporate and commercial fleet industry.
LeasePlan
LeasePlan is the world's leading high-touch service provider for vehicle leasing and fleet management.
Wheels, Inc.
First in fleet for 76 years. Wheels helps you build tomorrow’s fleet today.
ARI
Driven fleet professionals. Driving results.
NAFA Fleet Management Association
NAFA is the association for the diverse vehicle fleet management profession regardless of organizational type, geographic location, or fleet composition.



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