Information is power
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• For Colin Burton, the fleet consultancy manager with Mercedes-Benz, computers and modern fleet management techniques work best if they give you free time to make plans, decisions, and future strategies.
"The important thing is to give yourself the opportunity of making strategic decisions on vehicle replacements from a position of strength," he said. "Don't rely on gut feelings or outdated historical practices when you can have the facts on vehicle operating costs direct from a powerful monitoring system."
Base your changeover decisions on properly-analysed, and exhaustively-gathered fleet data. "Information is power."
Downtime costs are the best indicators of reliability and any fleet policy on whether you should buy new and sell early must be demand led.
Smaller fleets can afford a greater degree of flexibility and run more ageing vehicles for longer, said Burton.
Colin Kneller of English China Clays asked: who does the truck manufacturer consider as his ultimate customer with the rapid growth of contract hire, the on-the-road-operator or the contract hire financiers? Both, argued Burton and chairman David Yeomans of Wincanton: "The person who contract hires the vehicle, nine times out of ten, specifies which type of vehicle is supplied. It is a different relationship between the end user and the contract hire company."