environment magazine

Creating greener fleet operations in the face of continued financial austerity: a circus act or an opportunity for optimised operations?

By Ashley Sowerby, managing director, Chevin Fleet Solutions

Fleet management, by its very nature, will always be a major contributor to an organisation’s overall carbon footprint. Whether a fleet is made up of company cars, heavy plant equipment or vans and buses – the amount of fuel consumed and miles travelled can seriously damage an organisation’s green credentials. Gone are the days where monitoring fuel consumption and driver mileage were only concerns for the accounts department, and the respective employees reclaiming their expenses. This year fleet managers have never had more incentive to commit to not only monitoring carbon emissions but reducing and reporting on that reduction too.

Recent changes to emissions legislation, along with increasing pressure to be ‘seen as green’ within corporate social responsibility agendas, will provide a catalyst for traditionally environmentally unfriendly fleets to analyse existing operations. Such fleets will then be in a position to take one of two approaches: implement well intentioned yet meaningless processes in an attempt to help jump through the numerous legislative hoops and keep all the proverbial plates spinning, or seize the opportunity to genuinely tackle elements of fleet management - including driver behaviour, inappropriate vehicle allocation and maintenance, which contribute to inefficient and costly operations - to promote a culture of change and greener, leaner fleet management.

Legislative compliance
The Low Emission Zone (LEZ) regulation was introduced in 2008 to ‘encourage the most polluting heavy diesel vehicles driving in the capital to become cleaner’. As of January this year, the standards have become more stringent – with more vehicles now being affected and those previously affected required to meet even tighter emissions standards. This will mean larger vans, minibuses, lorries, buses and coaches registered before the 1st October 2006, unless provided with a certificate for fitting a filter or converting to an approved gas engine, will qualify for the daily charges for driving in the city’s LEZ.

Most qualifying vehicles will be automatically registered on Transport for London’s database, and number plate recognition cameras will operate to identify offending vehicles and issue the daily charges to the registered keeper accordingly.

When it comes to reducing emissions and cutting costs, fleet managers will now be forced to think carefully before sending a vehicle into the LEZ. Equally, Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs), which are between £500 and £1,000 depending upon the weight of the vehicle, for failure to meet the daily payments within the set time limits are likely to skyrocket without appropriate measures in place to manage both the allocation of vehicles and extensive amount of administration required to pay on time. Creating an intuitive and automated process to manage this new compliance obligation and payment streams, whilst reducing the likelihood of incurring PCNs for failure to pay promptly, should be a consideration for all organisations operating vehicles within the greater London area.

Driver behaviour
At the heart of creating a greener fleet is the organisation’s driver community and challenging traditional driving techniques. The Energy Saving Trust estimates that using smarter driving techniques can reduce fuel usage by up to 15 per cent, meaning real financial savings of over £250 per year per driver in fuel costs.

Instigating a shift in driving culture among an often large and seasoned group of driving professionals can be met with scepticism and resistance. In the first instance, opening up a dialogue with drivers to educate them to the pitfalls of harsh breaking, aggressive acceleration or lengthy vehicle idleing can pave the way for increased MPG and reduced emissions. However, taking a harder-edged approach to monitoring driver behaviour in order to be able to intervene when problem drivers are identified, is arguably a quicker and more successful means of achieving your carbon reduction cost saving objectives.

When it comes to monitoring driver behaviour in order to implement change, GPS tracking technology may be required. Yet, simply having access to data relating to driver behaviour isn’t enough to enable visibility or identify trends. Integration with fleet management software can translate raw data received from tracking devices into a meaningful breakdown of statistics and graphs relating to each driver. Better yet, intuitive technology can pluck problem drivers from the system in order to facilitate intervention, set improvement targets and agree incentive schemes.

Careful vehicle allocation
An element of fleet management that has previously remained relatively low on the fleet management agenda is that of appropriately matching vehicles with trips. Yes, ensuring a seven seater pool car isn’t assigned to a single driver when a small hatchback is available has always been best practice but there’s previously been no real pain associated with failing to adopt it. As we are all aware, these days, an organisations environmental stance can make the difference between a tender landing on a decision-maker’s desk or in their recycling bin.

Before the environment became a big issue, and before legislation like LEZ and The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme put an organisation’s environmental policy in the spotlight, fleets could get away with paying little attention to the utilisation of vehicles. With this increased demand to demonstrate carbon reduction best practice comes an increased need to monitor and manage vehicle usage. This is a straightforward task for a small and straightforward fleet but considering many fleets operate in between 500 and 20,000 vehicles, ensuring vehicles are utilised with the environment in mind can be a challenge, especially if relying upon paper-based methods of asset management.

Overcoming this barrier to effective vehicle utilisation can be achieved by implementing fleet management software that has the ability to provide total visibility over each and every vehicle, including its MPG and LEZ qualifications. Opting for a solution that provides intuitive alerts to users relating to the above is an additional way to take the pain out of the process and ensure green credentials are prioritised.

Maintaining green fleet momentum
The condition of a vehicle can significantly impact its environmental efficiency, so ensuring a fleet is well maintained is essential for any organisation keen to reduce its carbon footprint. And this means ensuring not only scheduled MOT and servicing is carried out regularly but also that day-to-day vehicle checks are conducted to ensure oil and water levels are where they should be and tyre pressure is correct. Again, this requires a certain level of employee engagement - especially for company car and grey fleet vehicles. To ensure checks are carried out on a per-trip, daily or weekly basis, particularly for large commercial vehicles, fleet managers can automate the process and remove the need for paper-based checks. In turn, through the use of mobile technology, like PDAs and Smart Phones, drivers can conduct checks and update the central office or workshop in real-time, providing increased control and reassurance that vehicles are operating at optimum efficiency.

Whatever your view on climate change, whether you’re an active environmental campaigner or you struggle to separate your household recycling come bin day, adopting green strategies in fleet management to help your organisation navigate its way through the myriad of legislation and create cleaner, leaner fleet operations is smart business sense. In times of economic uncertainty, going green may seem to some like an unnecessary expense, yet in many ways investing in greener processes in the short-term results in optimised fleet management operations, which in turn reduces cost in the long-term. Running an environmentally conscious, successful and compliant fleet in 2012 will require a lot of plate spinning, but new environmental legislation and implementation of greener processes shouldn’t be met with neither anxiety nor complacency but with excitement to rise to the challenge ahead.