We know that all fleets are different and that there are operational or legacy factors that can initially make a pooled fleet seem unsuited to a particular organisation. If you have been put off the idea of a pooled fleet because your fleet is just too unique or because you feel that the operational reality is simply too messy to fit in with an automated online solution, think again. Because PoolCar has been designed to fit in with your reality, not the other way round.
PoolCar has been designed to be very easy to adopt and use. We wanted vehicle users and managers to enjoy a streamlined and simplified process that anyone could gain real benefits from. But don’t let that simplicity fool you, under the hood, PoolCar is a powerful, custom-built SaaS solution with the capability to efficiently manage the complexities of any shared fleet.
PoolCar can include different pools within a unified system, ensuring the solution can be tailored to reflect your requirements.
For example, your fleet may be spread across several locations, such as multiple offices, branches, campuses, or depots, making a single pool of vehicles impractical. PoolCar can respond to this operational reality by having a pool for each location. With this solution in place, vehicle users can select vehicles from the vehicle pool assisgned to their location. Or alternatively, PoolCar can recognise a booker as being at a particular location and automatically only present the vehicles available in that location’s pool.
Location specific pools are also useful for employees when travelling to different work locations. A user can select and book a vehicle at the location they are temporarily going to be based at, simply by switching to the relevant pool. This takes any guesswork out of the equation, as it is simple to identify which vehicles belong to each location.
Another way to approach PoolCar’s pools is by dividing assets up by role. This may be necessary in large organisations where a vehicle is allocated to a specialist team or only used by individuals in specific roles. A common example is when an organisation has mission-critical assets that are only used by specific employees, such as maintenance teams or on-call healthcare workers. By creating a dedicated pool for these vehicles, you eliminate the likelihood that other employees will book them out by accident.
PoolCar also has the tools to take this level of authorisation a step further by restricting access to a specific pool of vehicles to authorised employees only. Pool permissions can be set on a user-by-user basis, giving PoolCar admins a great degree of flexibility. With this option in place, anyone who isn’t authorised to use a mission-critical asset won’t even be able to view them in the first place, let alone make a booking.
One of things that PoolCar enables is the ability for organisations to make decisions about their fleet’s utilisation through data. One way that pools can take advantage of this data is by ordering available vehicles based on various data points. These include utilisation score, lease/replacement score, or vehicle sustainability rating, and can be set on each individual pool.
For example, perhaps you have a fleet of maintenance trucks that are booked by technicians on an ad-hoc basis. On top of that, your organisation is heavily focused on reducing emissions, so it’s important to ensure that lower emission vehicles are used first. This is easy to achieve in PoolCar. First, the vehicles emission data is uploaded into PoolCar. Second, a maintenance pool is created, and the vehicles are added. Finally, the vehicle’s sustainability rating is chosen as the ordering priority. Now, whenever a maintenance technician chooses the pool in the calendar or searches based on vehicle availability, vehicles with a higher sustainability rating will be suggested first.
Now that we’ve established that Poolcar can consist of multiple pools serving different user groups you can even take the concept of a pool an additional step further. A pool in PoolCar can be used to manage virtually anything. One of our customers has put all the company car parks in a pool where employees can book them just like they book a vehicle. If you have a customer visiting your office and you want to book a parking space for them, book it in PoolCar. It’s that easy.
You could also set up a PoolCar pool for equipment that needs to be managed. Trailers, chainsaws and even iPads can be placed in PoolCar pools to manage their use. Once the possibilities are understood, Councils, education providers and any other organisation with shared equipment will find better ways to manage these assets with PoolCar.
Hopefully you can see how PoolCar provides a powerful and flexible approach to managing fleet bookings. If you’re ready to simplify your booking process, get in touch with us today to schedule a demo.
