Managing a fleet of cars for business involves a lot more than simply buying the vehicles and keeping them topped up with fuel and maintained. Managed well, the drivers themselves can end up safer and the vehicles in better condition. The right partner as a supplier is quite a help.
David Robertson manages the fleet for blind retailer, Shades Windows Blinds . The business is based in Cumbernauld with retail outlets through Scotland’s Central Belt and a small call centre at its HQ.
As a sales-led operation, getting people around the country is a core task. So a fleet of around 40-50 vehicles is in place, including management cars. The ones that help make the sales happen are the 22 Kia Picantos used by the sales reps.
“They do 10 to 12 calls per day, meeting the customers at their own homes,” explains Robertson. “Most of the other vehicles we have are commercial vehicles.”
Kia offered good terms on the Picantos as well as on the Rio used by the retail manager and the Sportages used by other management officers. “The first attractive thing was the warranty,” explained Robertson. “And the cost”. Robertson explained Kia does a seven-year warranty up to 100,000 miles and that cars have proved very economic for purpose.
The flexibility offered by Kia’s financing options was also a major factor in opting for the brand. With a fleet discount, the price became as attractive as the cars. Meanwhile, the cars’ low emissions and the consequent absence of road tax made the decision a no-brainer. “It was costs, to be honest, and they’re quite an attractive wee car,” he added.
With that decision made, getting the cars into the system and out on the road, was simple. But keeping the drivers focused requires just a little more work. In terms of keeping the drivers in touch with the business and perhaps more importantly keeping the business up to date with what the reps are doing, it’s pretty straightforward: the rep calls in while parked after every customer visit and reports the outcome, and then they call in again at the end of the day.
But that’s not where the popular image of the sales rep normally intersects with their cars – just mention that a used car has been owned by a salesperson and buyers expect high mileage and a tired engine after speeding up and down the country with a driver hungry for the next big deal. Robertson uses trackers to deal with this problem.
Trackers use the same technology as satnavs but instead report driving data back to the fleet manager. Trackers include a ‘harsh driving’ component, which tells you a driver’s about speed and any instances of harsh cornering or harsh braking. All of these things affect the quality of a drive in terms of comfort and above all safety of the pedestrians nearby and the driver.
“[Monitoring] keeps the fuel costs down, it keeps the wear and tear in the cars down,” Robertson says. “If the drivers know we can just put their driving onto a screen, which we do, they make an effort.” The company hasn’t any means of evaluating whether this improves the drivers’ skills outside work as well as when they’re on duty, but adopting good practice most of the time can only be beneficial.
This sort of monitoring is particularly relevant to a business like Shades because most of the driving takes place across a relatively small area each day for each driver. It wouldn’t make sense in economic terms to sell one pair of blinds in one area and then go somewhere a long way away by motorway, so this doesn’t happen. Certainly this sort of basic monitoring is the foundation of Robertson’s top tip for keeping fuel costs low. He advises to install trackers in fleet cars as a way of keeping fuel consumption down. The drivers have their actions recorded so there’s no comeback if they’ve gone wrong: “It tells us where they were and what they were doing – so if they were doing 46 miles per hour in a 40 limit, we can actually tell them they were breaking the law.”
This isn’t to say the driving was bad – just that it’s improved. So, is there anything else distinctive about the Shades fleet? The company started putting its symbol, the three blind mice, onto its cars, but abandoned this when kids started drawing extra whiskers on them, says Robertson. “Before you know it, the car’s covered in ink, so we stopped that! The next cars are going to be white so we might put a small amount of livery on them, maybe our email address or something very small.”
Indeed, Shades is going to replace the lot after three years – with more Kias. In the past the company might have kept them for longer and they’ve certainly been reliable: “We had been looking at how quickly the mileage had gone up on them, normally we’d replace them at around 80,000 miles,” explained Robertson. “But because of the deal Kia has offered us we’re going to go for Kia Rios and we’re going for the Diesel version.”
The advantages are clear: reliable cars that can be customised to a company’s needs. Moreover, Kia will refurbish and sell the existing fleet so it makes ecological as well as environmental sense. Going forward, Shades is a content Kia customer that will be sticking with their fleet models for the foreseeable future.
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