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"There's something I call the Keira story," says FleetCheck MD Peter Golding. He is describing the company's early days, regaling why it does what it does and who it is for. "This particular business, in Swindon, operated about 25 vans, and we supplied a lot of their vehicles. When they came back, they were in such a terrible state that my drivers would refuse to drive them. They would have illegal tyres, they'd never been serviced, never been maintained.
"I was sat with the owner of that business 18 years ago, and I said to him, 'you've really got a problem. Who manages these vehicles?' he said, 'Keira manages the vehicles'. I went, 'right great, can I speak to Keira?' he said, 'yeah, you walked past her when you came in. She's on reception, she answers the phone, and she looks after the fleet.'
"I then had an hour sitting with Keira. She was 18 years old; it was her first job from school, and she knew nothing about fleet management - how to maintain vehicles, their service intervals, what an MOT was and when it was due. and it was very obvious to me that Keira was representative of an awful lot of businesses."
It is telling that FleetCheck, founded in 2006, went on to dominate the SME fleet management market with its namesake software. The firm now manages more than 180,000 vehicles for over 7,200 users with a particular emphasis on vans, although it also covers cars and HGVs.
The software itself is designed to be cheap enough for SMEs to swallow. Prices start at £2 per month per vehicle for the basic 'Driver' version with a minimum expenditure of £20 per month and rise to £8, minimum £80 per month, for top end 'Expert', which, includes a fleet consultant.
While it does not exclusively work with operators that lack expertise, Golding says he "designed FleetCheck for Keira".
"I looked at what Keira's requirements were - that the company needed something that was intuitive and would proactively alert them to everything that needed to be done without them having to add the data or have that knowledge."
His background as a vehicle technician, an authorised MOT inspector, and then running two garages, makes him well versed in what a roadworthy vehicle does and does not look like. He mentions the "scores" of companies that would bring their cars and vans into those garages, who "really didn't know what they were doing", which became the genus for the company.
"There is a sort of common misconception that company car drivers look after their vehicles well because they are paying tax on them. and that everything is being run professionally and managed well," he says. "Unfortunately, we know the reality is that a lot of car fleets do struggle with how the cars are managed and their condition. But the perception. is that [drivers] see it as a benefit, and they will look after that vehicle.
"Very rarely do you find - if ever - a van driver who really does care for the van they are driving. There's a general concept that it's treated as a mobile office, a mobile dustbin, or it is just to get from A to B. [Drivers] don't pay tax on it in most cases, so they don't really look at it as a benefit-in-kind, and often, it's abused."
All of the above signposts what Golding describes as three reasons why people gravitate to fleet management software. The first is a lack of know-how, where those who, through no fault of their own, end up responsible for company vehicles without the foggiest.
"We've got the people who are managing vehicles as part of their job, or as a job share," he explains, "they may not have a lot of experience or qualifications, and there may be a lot they don't know around regulatory issues and things like that. An example is that people still think that looking at a plastic driver's licence photo card means that they are legal to drive. That's not uncommon."
The second reason is compliance. Golding is adamant that this is not rocket science, but believes fleets need sufficient visibility to execute it correctly.
"Fleet management software is what we have but, really, it is compliance software," he explains. "Fleet tends to be the second-largest overhead outside of payroll. to be able to manage those costs, you need a granular level of detail to see what you can and can't do and where you can save money."
Third and final is the regulatory side of things, specifically duty of care. It is allegedly not uncommon to find non-specialist fleet managers with little or no understanding of their obligations to mobile employees.
"There is a duty of care for anybody who is operating vehicles that, under the Health and Safety at Work act 1974, [should be] considered the workplace," says Golding. "In our experience, a lot of smaller businesses have grown, and their fleet size has gone from maybe five to 50, but they haven't properly invested in the support to manage those vehicles."
More often than not, such a fleet will manage its vehicles via a spreadsheet, which leads to something Golding refers to as 'spreadsheet fatigue'. He has discussed this extensively in the past, and even issued press releases on the subject. When asked to cite the company's chief competitors, he names Microsoft Excel.
"When you look at myriad [fleet] data that companies have, be it fuel, telematics - everything - you can have Excel formatted reports everywhere.
"I'll give you an example: a company that spends two days a month analysing all of this data and providing really meaningful mpg analysis on spreadsheets. They do that because you can't rely on the mileage from the fuel providers, and. drivers don't always give accurate milage when they fill up at a petrol station. In many, many cases, we've taken a job like that, and the whole process can be done in five minutes."
Efficiency measures are a big part of what the company does, and Golding claims the whole point is that users do not have to go through a laborious process to get the products up and running.
"I recognise the small to medium enterprise doesn't want to spend one-and-a-half days on a training course to know how to use the software," he explains. "Fairly early on, we recognised that one of the biggest challenges is actually getting started with it, so we take on that responsibility for the companies. We give them a form, we collect the data, we load all that data in, and we do what we call handover training, so when they are being given the software, all their data is in there and we are able to show them which of the vehicles are due an MOT and which are due a service. We can confidently steer them through that."
On top of its management software, the firm's ancillary services have been designed with the same plug-and-play principle. They include a walk-around driver check app designed to keep tabs on vehicle condition, which is said to have recorded more than 20 million inspections, and a licence-checking module, along with other services geared to heavy vehicle operators. Early in its existence, it paired up with Webfleet - formerly TomTom - and now counts heavyweights such as Teletrac Navman, Quartix and Lightfoot among the telematics firms that integrate with its software.
Golding's mantra for fleet management is that it is fundamentally common sense. "Every single person who drives knows that their vehicle needs to be legal," he says, matter of factly. The clincher is shining a light on exactly what those things are to which common sense should be applied, which is exactly what organisations without a dedicated fleet manager (widely acknowledged to be a growing group) need.
He recounts an occasion when he addressed a group of business car operators, many of whom fell into that category: "I spoke at an event quite some time ago with mainly car operators [as delegates] and I told the Keira story. I said, 'in most cases, companies will run company cars, or pool cars with a lease package, often with maintenance - but the responsibility for those vehicles sits with the company operating them, not with the people that are funding them'.
"After that, I had people come up to me and say, 'I'm Keira in our business. I'm new to this, and I had no idea I had this level of responsibility. I really, truly, thought, because I have leased cars with maintenance, that the responsibility sat with the leasing company.'
"What I try to do with companies is tell them it's absolutely imperative that they recognise this. Making sure the vehicle is maintained on time, to the correct interval, is not the responsibility of the leasing company - all they do is hold the purse. It's the responsibility of the operator."
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