What’s it going to take to stop doing the bare minimum?

By: Anonymous Fleet Manager

I ask a few simple questions of my team. All I want to know is that we’ve got a handle on our operations and we’re doing the right things. How hard can that be, right? Apparently very hard!

Now Finance is asking me about vehicle availability so we can get the budget and costings right on replacement and overheads. But I can’t even tell them my downtime costs. Even though we’re heads down bums up, they’re starting to think we may have too much idle staff.

I know we’ve got vehicle assets that aren’t available due to damage, safety issues and a few other faults. But nobody can produce any meaningful reports.

Just because there’s no mandate from upper management doesn’t mean we should be doing the bare minimum! It’s time to get our act together and start looking at some of these important performance metrics.

Rather than sitting back and doing business as usual, we need to take some initiative and work out what we need to measure and how to get the information. It’s going to take an across-the-board approach, but I don’t see another way to do it.

To stop our Anonymous Fleet Manager (AFM) blowing a gasket, we created Internal Combustion, a monthly column for fleet-related rants that lets him blow off some steam. Got a fleet gripe you'd like to get his opinion on? Email the editor who will pass it on to AFM... when he's in a good enough mood, that is.