In focus
Ford Fleet Management
New software, vehicle uptime, and trials aplenty are just some recent exploits for the Blue Oval’s fleet and leasing arm. Jack Carfrae reports.
Above: Ford Fleet
Management launched a sustainable delivery trial at London’s Billingsgate Market using electric vans.
“
he one thing you’re not short of as a fleet manager is data. You can get data reports and spreadsheets thrown at you right, left, and centre by suppliers. They will happily give them to you all day long. But what we found when we spoke to fleet managers is: ‘don’t give me more data; do something meaningful with it’.”
T
Above: John Wright Ford Fleet Management’s MD
That’s Ford Fleet Management’s MD, John Wright’s view on something with which many operators will be all too familiar. The Blue Oval’s leasing and fleet management offshoot launched in early 202,1 as a tie-up with what was then ALD Automotive, now Ayvens, as an uptime specialist offering to keep clientele rolling whatever the weather with a combination of standby vehicles and pragmatic use of telematics data. Its latest venture is a software system known as Fleet Vision. Developed with the AA’s Prestige Fleet Servicing (it does software development as well as SMR work) and launched in late 2023, it aims to soak up information from the firm’s vehicles (all Fords have been factory-fitted with connectivity hardware since mid-2019) and flag up issues before they reach debilitation point.
26 | February 2024 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
He is keen to add that the service is not limited to Ford’s own vehicles and says the system can absorb telematics data from others and, crucially, convert it into something a fleet can understand and make use of – or just do the whole thing for them.
“You can have a dashboard, you can see everything, and you can self-serve if you want, but actually, we think you want to spend a little bit more money per month, per vehicle, and we will interpret those signals for you and actually do something with them,” he explains. “The ultimate expression of it is that we’ve got people in the office monitoring the signals from our customers’ vehicles and making decisions for them. They don’t have to rely on the driver saying, ‘oh, an orange light’s come on on my dashboard. What do I do now?’ We actually know either that it’s on or – even better – we knew that it was about to come on and we’ve done something about it.”
The firm is geared towards vans and its genesis was, according to Wright, part of Ford’s “reboot” of its LCV operations, when it spotted a gap in its portfolio for a leasing and fleet management
business – notable in an age of leasing industry consolidation. Head of fleet management services, Craig Andrews, explains that it has also incorporated LCV-specific elements into the software.
“If you’ve got tail lifts, winches, stretchers – anything that’s got a regulatory compliance event – a customer can now see, by vehicle, all of the scheduled time when they know it’s going to be off the road. We can add to those events to try and minimise the time that the vehicle’s off the road and include the health alerts from the telematics.”
At the more traditional end of things, the company now has around 4,000 vehicles on its books and a managed fleet of circa 6,500. We first interviewed Wright in mid-2021, in the throes of post-pandemic production shortages, which he believes have upended the vehicle acquisition game.
“I think it’s fundamentally changed the mindset of a lot of fleet operators,” he explains, “if they changed their vehicles every four years, they now change them every five. Some are even pushing lead times out further.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
