In focus “


Jaama I


Above: Martin Evans, managing director at software company Jaama.


The software company says fleets are having to make a little go a long way – even more so after the pandemic. Managing director Martin Evans tells Jack Carfrae why.


always say it but, particularly over the past couple of years, our customers are increasingly having to do more with less people,” that is Jaama managing director Martin Evans’ opening gambit in our conversation. It is a grim reality, but he is right. Pukka fleet managers have been on the wane for years, and their responsibilities increasingly fall to non-specialists in other departments, such as HR or finance. Either that, or once- hearty fleet teams just get smaller. It also explains why the industry is ever more reliant on external specialists, so it makes sense that 2021 was the fleet software company’s best-ever year. New additions to its client base comprised two of the UK’s 50 biggest leasing companies (it now works with 12 of them) and 15 rental firms and fleets.


Formed in 2004, its Key2 system is its bread and butter, and is said to go full Sherlock Holmes on any kind of data a fleet can throw at it. As its website says, “if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.


Evans reckons that the lingering effect of the pandemic – remote working chief among them – is one of the main reasons for the uptick in business.


12


Many cars no longer need a monthly service and operate on a mileage basis.


“If you look at what the drivers for change would typically be within the business, some of it is a bit of distress with the environment changing,” he explains, “[fleets] have got to make their operations more efficient. “Also, I think remote working is a real big thing here, because if you look at some of the things that come with running company cars – accidents, defects and all that kind of stuff – it’s not so bad when everybody is in the office, a vehicle turns up and somebody can eyeball it.”


The firm’s app, known as MyVehicle, has proved popular for this reason. It feeds information from drivers into the Key2 system and, according to Evans, is one of the most straightforward ways of keeping tabs on vehicles that are not conveniently on site. “People can take pictures of their car and send them in [to the fleet department]. If they’ve had a puncture and they go into the office every day, they just ask somebody opposite ‘who do I go to? ATS or the leasing company?’ Nowadays, if they are working from home, they want that information served up to them within something like an app, so that they don’t need to call anybody. And the last thing the fleet manager wants is somebody pestering them about those sorts of things. The app takes all of that away.”


There is more to Jaama’s systems than a quick download, and the company has to train


22 | May 2022 | www.businesscar.co.uk


users to operate them effectively. Pre-Covid, that would have involved extensive in-person guidance but, like much of the rest of the world, it has since established digital training programmes which, according to Evans, often work better.


“One of the good things about it is that a lot of the companies we sell to tend to be the bigger, nationwide fleets. Quite often, when we’ve gone to see them, half the people in the fleet department will be travelling. And you think, from an environmental perspective, for one training day or whatever it is, how much CO2 is that going to use? I wouldn’t go all- out and say complete remote implementations are the way forward, but a hybrid of the two makes sense.


“Certainly, some of our customers are liking the idea of remote training because, as you can imagine, the fleet teams are in different places. They are often not highly paid people with company cars… and for some of them, it’s a big wrench to pull them out for the day when they want to be home by a certain time, to take them to Tamworth [Jaama’s base] or somewhere else for training.”


Barring some overseas clients, for whom virtual training was necessary from a logistical perspective, Evans says the practice has been “pretty much completely online since” the pandemic for UK fleets. “It’s certainly driven change,” he says.


Data is one of the main reasons that firm needs a proper chat with its clients before its software is properly up and running. As Evans explains, the standard and availability of it is the clincher.


“There’s a lot of configuration within our product, so it’s understanding things like: what data have they got to go into the system, and what’s the quality of the data? Our product doesn’t like bad data – things like overlapping allocations – so where has that data has come from, and is it any good?


“Then there is consultancy around things like their financial year. How do they work the calendar? Do they have 12 or 13 periods in a year? What’s rechargeable, what’s not? Then we’ve got the training for the users, and we try and break that down so it’s relevant, because there’s nothing worse than a user who is only interested in one area sitting through training for something they are never going to use. It loses people pretty quickly. We think about all of those things, but yes, prior to the pandemic, that would have all happened face-to-face.” Yet another trend thrown up by the pandemic, which again ties into remote working, is a reduction in fleet mileage. That is not news in the slightest, but Evans believes it has had a knock-on effect on SMR, specifically the worth of maintenance bundles traditionally tacked onto contract hire agreements.


“I think some of our customers are looking at it from the perspective of, if they’re not doing large amounts of miles, they are spending quite a lot of money for not a lot of benefit in terms of tyres and servicing. Lots of cars nowadays don’t even need a 12-monthly service – it’s more mileage-based – so it’s certainly driven those costs down now vehicles are doing less miles. “I think the whole concept of contracted maintenance is about de-risking it for the fleet customer. It sounds attractive – the idea


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