“Why don’t I just manage fleet bookings in a Microsoft Outlook Calendar?” It’s a question we are asked frequently at Smartrak.
There’s no denying that you can certainly manage a shared fleet with Microsoft Outlook Calendar. However, we genuinely believe you’d be doing your organisation a great disservice. Outlook is primarily a communications tool. It handles emails and personal calendars with aplomb. However, using a calendar to manage shared resources is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
We’ve put together a list of reasons why a shared Outlook Calendar won’t provide the level of functionality required by any modern Fleet Manager. If you are considering using a shared Outlook Calendar to manage your pool vehicle fleet, read on to learn why a solution like Smartrak’s PoolCar will serve you better in the long run.
It’s no secret that that even the best laid plans can go awry. Especially when it comes to unscheduled traffic jams. When your organisation relies on a shared vehicle fleet, there is a distinct possibility that someone back at the office is waiting to use that vehicle.
But if someone is running late, how do you ensure that any delays don’t snowball throughout the day? How do you ensure the next person has enough notice to change their booking and secure an alternative vehicle?
When managing your pool vehicles in a Shared Outlook Calendar, you are relying on staff to be proactive in these situations. Have you ever had to kick someone out of a meeting room because their booking has run overtime and they haven’t updated the Outlook Calendar booking? Now imagine how much harder that would be if the asset is a vehicle that hasn’t returned to the office. The driver would have to realise that they’re running late and call the staff member of the next booking to notify them. Providing they realise there is another booking and know who created it, of course.
In contrast, PoolCar has an automated system specifically designed to handle situations where the current booking runs overtime. Firstly, the system can automatically add a buffer period between each booking. This grace period smooths out any hiccups from small delays, and the time it takes to return keys to a key management solution. Secondly, an alert is sent to the Fleet Manager that a booking hasn’t been closed off on time. They can action the task of rebooking straight away, without having to involve the individual staff member. Of course, should all other vehicles be out of the office, they can also proactively organise alternative transportation.
When it comes to shared vehicle management, key management is often ignored or downplayed. Organisations are generally focused primarily on the ability to manage bookings. However, it is also vital to make sure that keys can’t be accessed independently of bookings. Otherwise, bookings can fail to work as the vehicle can’t be accessed or operated. Or worse, the vehicle isn’t even where it’s supposed to be.
When managing your pool vehicles with a shared Outlook Calendar, you also lack a key management system. Instead, you rely on staff to make sure they don’t take the wrong keys and return them on time to the right location/hook. Often in these scenarios a member of the administration staff is tasked with their management, or worse, keys are stored in a communal area. If keys go missing or are lost, it is very difficult to audit who last had them.
In contrast, PoolCar integrates directly with our two key management solutions: KeyMaster and Keyless Entry. Both require a valid vehicle booking for staff to access a vehicle’s keys. Utilising these solutions also ensures only authorised staff can access vehicles, and should keys disappear, fleet managers can easily identify who last had them.
Not all vehicles in an organisation’s fleet are shared equally. In some cases, vehicles might only be used for specific purposes or by a select group of staff. Common examples include manual transmissions, maintenance vehicles, and buses. In these cases, it makes sense to restrict which staff can access these vehicles. You don’t want untrained or unauthorised staff damaging equipment or themselves.
Outlook Calendars have limited capacity to restrict who can access a shared resource. If a user can search for it in the scheduling assistant, there’s no way to stop them from booking it. That means you’d have to add in additional layers of administration to ensure you’re gatekeeping mission-critical assets.
PoolCar has the ability to restrict usage on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis. What’s more, you don’t need to allocate more resources to police these restrictions. If a user doesn’t have permission, they simply won’t see the vehicle as an option. Does this truck only need to be driven by the maintenance staff? Does the bus require a special driver’s licence? PoolCar’s vehicle and group permissions make solving these scenarios simple.
It’s important to keep an eye on the odometer readings of fleet vehicles. Readings are used to ensure vehicle maintenance is completed on time, and also tracks the lifecycle of an individual vehicle. It can also be used to claim tax incentives, such as RUC and Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) in New Zealand, and both FBT and Fuel Tax Credits in Australia.
When organisations rely on Outlook Calendars to manage pool vehicles, it often means they’re also relying on manual paper odometer records. Without fail, this means they’re running into a whole host of problems, including manual data input and tracking data via spreadsheets.
PoolCar has multiple ways to track vehicle odometers, including staff logging into PoolCar and updating their trip distance. When combined with a KeyMaster key cabinet, this data can be captured when the vehicle is returned. The process can also be completely automated by combining PoolCar with a GPS tracking solution like Smartrak’s OBD-II. The data can be pulled directly from the vehicle into the PoolCar system. This means there’s no room for user error.
It’s important for Fleet Managers to be able to make informed decisions about how their vehicles are being utilised. Fleet budgets are often razor thin, so the ability to make potential cost reductions can only be a good thing. Having the tools to do that is therefore incredibly important.
Unfortunately, because a Shared Outlook Calendar is primarily a scheduling tool, it doesn’t capture vehicle utilisation data or have inbuilt reporting capabilities. We often get enquires for PoolCar for exactly these reasons.
PoolCar has a whole suite of inbuilt reports designed specifically to inform Fleet Managers about how their fleet is performing. With this data you can start making informed decisions about your fleet. Do you need more vehicles, or do you have too many? What’s more, you can enhance PoolCar with a GPS tracking solution like our OBD-II. This allows you to gain even more insights on how vehicles are being used when they leave the car park.
Often, organisations spread the costs of their fleet across multiple departments. By analysing the number of bookings each department has made, Fleet Managers can charge the individual departments for their usage. This ensures whoever is running the Fleet Department isn’t responsible for all vehicle running costs.
As far as we can tell, there is no easy way to report on who has booked a shared resource in Shared Outlook Calendars. It may be possible to download an excel report as an Outlook administrator. However, this would likely be a time-intensive process involving data manipulation in various Excel spreadsheets.
PoolCar has the native ability to assign a cost centre to individual users. It can also be a required piece of information when making a booking, so the data isn’t skipped or missed. This means that every vehicle booking is automatically allocated to a department in your organisation. This makes the job of assigning fleet costs a simple and straightforward process for Fleet Managers.
Imagine this scenario: You’re heading out to an important client meeting and you did the right thing by planning ahead and booking a car. Unfortunately, when you go to collect the keys another staff member claims they have a booking for the same vehicle.
In certain cases, Outlook Calendars will allow users to double-book resources. While this might be uncommon, it’s certainly not how a system designed to manage shared resources should operate. Especially when the organisation’s success relies on travel.
PoolCar is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. This means it is designed from the ground up to be managed in an online environment. Consequently, as soon as a booking is created, that booking can be viewed by everyone who is logged into the system. It will also not allow another booking for that vehicle and time slot to be created afterwards. This means that double bookings cannot occur.
While we believe that PoolCar is the perfect tool to help organisations manage their shared fleets, we do recognise that it’s not going to be suitable for every use case. If you are a small organisation or only have a couple of (<5) shared vehicles, then it might be worth exploring alternative solutions. PoolCar really starts creating value when its managing 20, 50, or more than 100 vehicles.
However, while a Shared Outlook Calendar might be the best solution for your needs today, it may not always be the case. We’re always more than happy to discuss how Smartrak and PoolCar can help manage your shared fleet.
So, there you have it. While Shared Microsoft Outlook Calendars can certainly manage a shared fleet, in most cases it’s not the best tool for the job. PoolCar automates a large number of tasks associated with shared vehicles fleets. This means Fleet Managers and administrators don’t have to chase missing keys or sort out double bookings.
If you’re ready to simplify your shared fleet, we’d love to hear from you.
If you’re looking for a pool booking solution to manage your shared fleet, you may not give much consideration to GPS tracking. Streamlining access to vehicles is likely your top priority. But what you may not know is that GPS tracking can provide a wide range of data that can complement a pool booking solution.
Fleet utilisation is a metric that allows Fleet Managers to easily understand how often their vehicles are being used. By implementing a booking solution like PoolCar, Fleet Managers instantly get visibility over how often vehicles are being booked out. You can easily see what percentage of your fleet is being used on any particular day.
But vehicle bookings only tell half the story. What happens once your fleet vehicles leave the car park? Unless you have a GPS tracking solution, you won’t know. A GPS solution like the OBD-II fills in the gaps between when the vehicle left the car park and when it returns. The data it reveals might surprise you.
Let’s suppose someone books a vehicle for a two-hour period. If that’s the only booking for the day, you might assume that this particular vehicle has a utilisation of 25% (a two-hour booking divided by an eight-hour workday). However, that is seldom the full story.
GPS data can reveal how much of that booking the vehicle was actually moving – or being utilised. If the person who needed the car was simply driving to and from a meeting that’s fifteen minutes away, the utilisation data is much less. Taking this new data into consideration, the utilisation of the vehicle is actually only 6.5% (.5 divided by 8 hours)
This more granular detail can give you insights into how your fleet is actually being utilised. In the scenario above, perhaps the staff member is encouraged to take an Uber or taxi, or public transport instead. By offering alternatives, you free your fleet up for more pressing trips. It also potentially enables you to start reducing your fleet size and therefore your fleet operating costs.
One of the other ways that the OBD-II is a natural extension to PoolCar is how it makes tracking vehicle data easier. PoolCar can help you keep track of each of your vehicle’s odometers. It can be done manually updated in the PoolCar software. It can also be done via the KeyMaster key cabinet – Staff can be prompted to enter the current odometer reading as part of the check-in process. But both these methods require data entry.
The OBD-II measures the distance travelled by the vehicle and communicates it directly to Smartrak and PoolCar. That means you don’t need to rely on staff filling in paper logbooks or guessing the correct reading when they forget to jot it down. The data is uploaded and synchronised automatically – no input required.
Another benefit from combining OBD-II with is that you can monitor driver behaviour. While PoolCar allows you to see who is driving your fleet vehicles at any time, it doesn’t provide data on how the driver performed during the booking.
The OBD-II provides the ability to track not only where the vehicle has travelled, but how fast it was travelling during the trip. This provides your organisation with the ability to monitor drivers who may be driving in a dangerous manner. You can look at trends around speeding and provide education to those who are consistently travelling above posted speed limits.
PoolCar provides data on who is driving, and the OBD-II provides data between the start and end of the booking.
Are you looking to extend your PoolCar experience? Talk to us today to learn more.
We understand that every fleet is different. Some fleets are just starting their GPS tracking journey, while others are already reaping the benefits from fleet optimisation data. Regardless of where your fleet might be, there is an untapped opportunity to learn more about your fleet. Smartrak’s OBD-II presents the perfect route to enhance your GPS solution.
Regardless of the maturity of your fleet tracking solution, Smartrak’s OBD-II can help you take the next step to enhance your gps solution.
One of the advantages of the OBD-II is that it offers a simple, plug-and-play installation. Most modern vehicles have an OBD-II port which can be accessed with relative ease. This means you or your staff can do the installation yourself. Simply plug the device in, then contact our support desk to register the device to your Smartrak instance.
That means you don’t have to schedule an authorised installer to come out to your office. That means you don’t have to remove sections of your fleet from work rotations to hardwire GPS hardware into each vehicle. Instead, you can easily install the OBD-II hardware in your own time and at your own pace.
Regardless of whether you choose to lease or purchase your vehicles, at some stage you’ll be looking to de-fleet old vehicles and acquire new ones. We talk a lot about how data from GPS tracking can help you make decisions about new fleet acquisitions. However, regardless of what new vehicles you acquire, at the end of the day you’ll still need to swap out GPS hardware in your new fleet acquisition.
The plug-and-play functionality of the OBD-II makes this transition simple and pain-free. Once the OBD-II has been transferred, we can register it against the new vehicle in Smartrak. By doing this transfer you can distinguish where the old vehicle’s data ends and the new vehicle data starts. Simply inform us that you’re transitioning the OBD-II to a new vehicle, and Smartrak will handle the rest.
When you invest in technology you want to be sure that you’re going to get a good return on that investment. Smartrak’s OBD-II takes advantage of the newer 4G mobile technology. This is important, as Telstra has announced that their the 3G network is being switched off in Australia in June 2024. While Vodafone has announced that its 3G operations will cease in New Zealand from late August 2024.
By choosing a 4G enabled device, you are effectively future proofing your investment in GPS tracking. It won’t be obsolete for a long while yet, so you’ll have the opportunity to maximise your ROI.
If you’ve already started the journey into fleet GPS tracking, then the OBD-II can offer a fantastic way to compliment your existing tracking solution. Perhaps you have some AVLs installed in your mission-critical vehicles.
Chances are that you don’t have tracking across all your fleet vehicles. The OBD-II can provide you with an affordable means of expanding tracking to a larger section of your fleet. This can be useful way to add tracking to vehicles that may not need the added tracking capabilities offered by our AVLs and Garmin devices.
If you haven’t yet started the journey into fleet GPS tracking, then the OBD-II is a great entry point. It provides a lower barrier to entry and is cost effective. It also gives you the ability to test the waters before rolling GPS tracking to the rest of your fleet.
The 2019 bushfire season was one of the most devastating in recent history. The fires destroyed More than 10 million hectares of forest, businesses, and homes across Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. With summer on the horizon, it’s important to ensure you prepare your fleet for this the upcoming bushfire season.
When you have workers operating in remote locations, it’s vital that you have the tools to react to fast-moving situations. Tools such as fleet tracking and emergency duress buttons provide an important safety net for lone workers. These provides peace of mind for both you and your staff; You know where they are, and if they get into trouble they can send a message back to base.
This is especially important when considering how the summer bushfire season is going to change in the future. The Bureau of Meteorology announced that Australian summers are going to start earlier, last longer, and be more intense. To combat this, Fleet Managers need to be proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to keeping their most important assets safe from bushfires.
Earlier this year, Smartrak staff were called as witnesses in the Royal Commission on National Natural Disaster Arrangements. Casey Molloy, Smartrak’s Director of Sales and Eugene Bilgnaut, Smartrak’s Solution Engineer were asked to discuss how Smartrak’s technology could be used to help before, during, and after natural disasters. It is clear that having the ability to track both assets and bushfires in real time is going to become even more important in the coming years.
Smartrak offers a number of fleet tracking solutions, enabling our customers to track their vehicles in real-time. Our mapping system has a variety of Geographical Information System (GIS) layers that can enhance the base map. GIS layers are used to add unique information or company-specific assets. They can also be an invaluable tool for monitoring and directing your fleet operations around natural disasters such as bushfires.
The data for the bushfire GIS layer is sourced directly from official sources such as the CFA, the NSW Fire Service, and the Queensland Fire Service. When activated on top of your base map, it can provide quick insights into where your staff are located, and how close they are to nearby fires. It also eliminates the need for juggle multiple websites, maps or apps in order to keep on top of the latest information.
If you notice that a worker has strayed too close to an active bushfire, our technology gives you the ability to proactively communicate with them. A text message sent to one of our Garmin 790s, or a call via satellite might be the difference between getting out safely or a terrible tragedy.
The Australian Bushfire Overlay is available to all Smartrak customers. To activate it, simply log in to your account at smartrak.com. Once you are looking at your map, simply click on the layers icon in the top right hand corner. From there, select the “bushfires” option from the list.
This summer make sure you have the right tools at your disposal. Use the Bushfire GIS overlay to ensure your workers and assets stay safe.
The global pandemic struck just when Mobility concepts were gaining traction. With smarter, more flexible ways for commuters and businesses to interact with mass, micro, and active transportation options are Mobility solutions still relevant and viable?
E-scooters and eBikes were on the cusp of solving that first/last mile challenge of how you get from your house to the train station or from the bus stop to the office.
Unified payment systems were heralding a new era of journeying convenience by allowing us to choose from multiple transport options and pay through a single online gateway.
Encouraging signs were evident that businesses were willing to consider transport options beyond vehicles, embracing fleet management tools that offered alternatives, such as public transport, bikes, e-scooters, and even walking.
Dead zones in metropolitan transport maps showed signs of being populated by micro and shared transport options that whisked suburban residents to their nearest mass transit station.
Then COVID-19 happened…
Initially it was about hunkering down at home, working from your kitchen table and seldom venturing out. Then necessity forced some of us outside, where we found a degree of comfort by returning to our cars and staying away from the possibly infectious environments of buses and trains.
In this situation, the Grey Fleet, where private vehicles are used to complete business tasks found favour, as employees shied away from using public transport on workdays and embraced the convenience of the car in the driveway.
Another factor in heightened Grey Fleet activity is the prevalence among businesses of centralised and shared fleets. In the drive for increased efficiency, the traditional model of allocating a vehicle to a single user has given way to a strategy of shared vehicles. This has undoubtedly improved utilisation, but it’s questionable whether a shared, centralised fleet of vehicles was the appropriate solution in a pandemic environment, with employees working from home and concerns about shared vehicles becoming vectors for virus transference.
A confluence of factors, including reluctance to go back to public transport, centralised business fleets that are now remote from home workers, and the attraction of roads with less traffic has seemingly increased the attractions of the Grey Fleet and stopped progress towards broadscale Mobility adoption.
At first glance, international studies appear to support this conjecture. They show that people who own a car are now relying on it more, but that’s not the whole story. In those same cities, people who never had a car and previously relied on public transport are now embracing cycling or walking.
While COVID-19 has undoubtedly set back mass transit plans in our cities, with public transit use falling 70-90% in major cities across the world, it has also opened up opportunities for change that urban planners and transport providers can capitalise on. In Bogota, Columbia they’ve added 76 kilometres of cycle lanes to encourage social distancing. New York City has closed several streets to traffic to enable the same, and Oakland in California has closed 119 kilometres of streets to vehicles, allowing pedestrians and cyclist to remain two metres apart.
If initiatives like these translated into sustainable change, we would have the transport networks in place to encourage ongoing micro-mobility use, and to provide the car-free routes that facilitate bringing back trams or inaugurating light-rail. Seen like this, COVID-19 is an opportunity for civic leaders to give Mobility a push.
On the business front too, there are signs that opportunity could spring from adversity. The proliferation of micro-mobility suppliers had led to instances of gross oversupply in e-scooters and bikes, with little or no strategy to providing comprehensive availability. The focus on high-volume locations in the city centres resulted in high concentrations of e-scooters in these areas, with virtually nothing to help with first mile challenges in the suburbs. COVID-19’s shrinking of the consumer base may lead to the M&A activity that brings scale to the micro-mobility offering and maturity to deployment strategies. Only then will micro-mobility fulfil its role in a broad and fully inclusive Mobility offering.
When the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns swept the globe many of us were pleasantly surprised at the dramatic improvements in air quality our cities experienced. We generally told ourselves to appreciate clean air and clear views while they were there, because a return of vehicle pollution was inevitable.
Now, there’s a growing awareness that the benefits of fewer vehicles could be a long-term outcome of the pandemic. Grey Fleets could be the last gasp of private vehicle ownership, or maybe they are an example of how private and business vehicle use could merge into a single entity. When the specialist requirements of utilities and service companies are removed, the global vehicle fleet is pretty much made up of vehicles that suit private and business use.
Imagine how many vehicles we could remove from our streets if you didn’t have to own one to make use of one? Just book that saloon that’s sitting idle in a company car park all weekend.
That’s a win, win result; for the organisations that want to reduce fleet costs, people who want cars without the burdens of ownership and the cities that want to give streets back to people.
Thought should also be given to expanding the Grey Fleet, to encompass Micromobility options like bikes and e-scooters. There are programmes in the Netherlands and the UK where government and some enlightened employers are actively promoting bike ownership to get people out of cars. Building on this idea, by encouraging employees to use their company sponsored bikes to get to meetings is an obvious solution in locations where the distances to be travelled are not so great.
With thinking like this, the Grey Fleet, looks more like the ‘green’ fleet envisaged by Mobility advocates.
It’s no secret that the keys to your fleet’s vehicles are important. Without them your staff won’t be going anywhere and replacing them will be a costly exercise. But did you know that there’s more to our KeyMaster cabinets than just key storage? Keep reading to learn how you can take your KeyMaster to the next level.
Keeping tabs on how your fleet is performing ensures that you can be proactive when issues arise. One easy way to do this is to question staff about how the vehicle performed and if there were any issues that you should know about. But you can’t expect your staff to survey everyone when they arrive at the office. It defeats the purpose of automated key management. Thankfully there’s a solution.
KeyMaster cabinets work hand-in-hand with the PoolCar booking platform. As part of the booking process, you can opt to ask the driver questions when returning the keys to the cabinet. Staff can enter their responses via the accompanying touch screen, ensuring you’re capturing the relevant information while it’s fresh in the driver’s mind.
What’s more, questions are completely customisable. So you can ask the exact questions your organisation needs to keep your fleet running optimally.
Here are some example questions our customers ask their drivers when returning from a trip:
Fleet sizes aren’t static— they change over time as organisations learn to right-size their fleet. Consequently, an organisation’s key storage and management requirements will change too. The last thing you want to discover is that the key management solution you’ve invested in can’t grow to meet future demands.
Thankfully, that’s not the case with a KeyMaster cabinet. When you invest in a KeyMaster, you’re laying the foundation for future key management expansion. The main KeyMaster has the ability control any secondary cabinets, so that when you need to expand, they all work together in unison.
KeyMaster’s modular cabinet design supports cost-effective scalability, controlling from 12-100 keys via a single head unit.
One of the main reasons organisations look to automate their pool booking and key management is to introduce a comprehensive audit trail should something go wrong. If a staff member makes a booking, it’s reasonable to assume that they’re going to collect the keys and drive the vehicle. If the vehicle is in an accident, a traffic infringement occurs during the booking, or the keys go missing, it’s easy to trace who is responsible.
However, automation can’t always account for the unexpected. There’s technically nothing to stop staff from handing their staff ID or booking number to someone else. This might be against company policy, but could be necessary in certain situations This poses a problem: should the keys go missing or the vehicle is in an accident, who took the keys?
KeyMaster has a simple and elegant solution. A discrete camera is built into the KeyMaster unit. When someone enters a booking, an image is captured and stored on the PoolCar server. This ensures that if someone does take a set of keys out of key storage that they shouldn’t have, you have photographic evidence that can help track them down again.
Some people, if left to their own devices, will monopolise communal assets, and keep keys for their own convenience.
KeyMaster can eliminate this problem. Keys are permanently stored inside the cabinet, can only be removed with a valid booking via PoolCar, and must be returned at the end of the booking to close it off. What’s more, if keys aren’t returned the system will generate an automated alert so that Fleet Managers can promptly track down the missing keys.
We understand that nobody’s perfect and we’ve all got multiple deadlines and competing work priorities. When staff return to the office ready to tackle the next item on their task list, it’s understandable that returning a set of car keys might not be a high priority.
But that moment of forgetfulness can cause delays for the next person waiting to use the vehicle. Just like a doctor’s surgery, a few delays at the start of the day can add up to hours of delays by the end of the day. Rather than making the next person run around tapping people on the shoulder in an effort to locate the keys, KeyMaster can easily solve this problem
If staff don’t return keys at the end of their booking period, KeyMaster can send an automated alert to the Fleet Manager. This will inform them who has the keys, how far over the booking is, and give them the opportunity to check-in with the driver to make sure everything is alright. This ensures that any missing keys can easily be traced back to the source of the problem.
As you can see, while key management is the primary focus of the KeyMaster key cabinet, there are lots of additional benefits that come with the implementation of an automated key management solution. Get in touch with us to organise a demonstration or to discuss how we can help improve the management of your fleet.
When people start researching the topic of key management for their fleets, they often think about a way to effectively store their keys. But whether you hang them on hooks in the office or keep them in a drawer, without the means to effectively manage who can access them, you haven't really solved your key management problem.
In this episode of Smartrak Conversations, Matt and Nick discuss the topic of key management. Tune in to discover:
Health and safety is something that every organisation must grapple with. But when you consider the many types of situations that workers might find themselves in, organisations must have a comprehensive health and safety solution.
In this episode of Smartrak Conversations, Matt and Nick examine vehicle based safety and lone worker safety -- two areas that are important, but might not always be high on an organisation's radar. Tune in to discover:
An employee’s privately-owned vehicle that’s also used for work tasks is said to belong to the Grey Fleet. This is a practice that’s always enjoyed a level of acceptance, and the attraction of it has been further enhanced by the Working-from-Home necessities generated by COVID-19.
It seems like a simple and convenient solution for both employer and employee, but Fleet Managers need to be aware of the risks.
Grey Fleet use is now a very common practice, but that doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea.
Using private vehicles for work used to be the domain of freelancers and the self-employed. Now it’s seen as a necessary option for manys organisations and their employees.
In the UK, Grey Fleet activity can be attributed to a huge 40% of all vehicle activity on the roads. And it’s not just the private sector that’s utilising employee vehicles to meet operational demands. In Australia’s public sector, the Grey Fleet is estimated to account for nearly 57% of all vehicle milage.
There are a number of reasons for this prevalence. In most cases, Working from Home means logging in at a computer in your makeshift office. But for workers with tasks that involve face-to-face meetings, monitoring equipment in the field, or managing sales territories, there are still reasons to be on the road.
If employees are fortunate to be allocated a company vehicle, then little changes. However, issues arise if staff rely on pool vehicles. Suddenly the pool is no longer easy to access and insufficient to meet all demands from a decentralised workforce. As a result, using a private car (Grey Fleet) becomes an attractive option for employees.
On the face of it, it seems a simple and expedient answer, but unfortunately there’s more to it than that, and your company’s responsibilities in regard to these Grey Fleet vehicles should be known before Fleet Managers pursue this option.
When your employees use a private vehicle for company business the duty-of-care responsibilities are the same as when they’re behind the wheel of a company vehicle.
According to Doctor Darren Wishart, who chaired a Safe Work Australia seminar on the subject, it’s a case of: “Out of sight, out of mind.” Unfortunately, that laissez-faire attitude to adopting a Grey Fleet solution could end up generating unexpected costs and producing more issues than running a fleet of company-owned vehicles. This happens because now you’re also responsible for your employee’s vehicle, and how it’s looked after.
Most organisations rotate their fleet vehicles once they reach a certain age or milage. The average age for private vehicles in Australia is 10 years, and it’s more than 14 years in New Zealand. Therefore, there’s no guarantee the Grey Fleet vehicle you are relying on is up to standard. Has the Warrant of Fitness expired, has the vehicle been serviced regularly, and is it roadworthy? If something goes wrong your company is just as liable for the consequences as the employee who owns it. Accidents, injury, third-party claims, insurance hassles. These are all possible outcomes of using unsuitable vehicles and cutting corners in their management.
If that private vehicle is a poorly maintained 15-year-old car and it’s warrant of fitness has expired your company is just as liable for the consequences as the employee who owns it.
It may not seem fair, but in regard to Grey Fleet vehicles, the authorities see very little distinction between the vehicle maintenance decisions your company makes and your employee makes. If the vehicle concerned is being used for company business the buck stops at your desk too.
