Fleet Operator

This reflects the status of many companies who have multiple locations but also which have a number of different types of drivers. Drivers that simply drive the company’s vans; to individuals who have been issued company cars; through to those who drive their own car on company business.

Key factors

1. Combination of Home and Office-based Workers in multiple locations
2. Fleet Costs distributed across multiple cost centres
3. Cash Takers

Solution

1. Combination of Home and Office-based Workers in multiple locations

This client experienced regular and ongoing issues obtaining sight of original driving licences with their employees being scattered across the country and their being no effective system to identify outstanding checks. Company policy required six monthly checks but the cycle was never complete and some manual checks had been outstanding for 2 years.The client’s employees are located across the UK working from offices and home.

Solution:
As production of an original licence on a regular basis was the major issue in this case we had to deal with two issues, existing staff and new starters.

We took immediate steps to ensure that all new starters were enrolled on our system by providing the HR Department with the necessary consent forms to enable new drivers to be captured onto our database and their permission obtained for licence checks as part of the process of joining the company.

Existing drivers were canvassed on two occasions and by mail or e-mail (as appropriate). Outstanding drivers were clearly identified to the client at the end of the process with the very few unresponsive drivers passed on by the client for remedial action by line managers.

Second and subsequent checks took place without the involvement of the drivers and the whole process took three weeks from start to finish.

2. Fleet Costs distributed across multiple cost centres

This client allocated fleet costs and reported on fleet management issues by cost centre rather than geographical locations and this was a major headache for them when assimilating driving licence data from the photocopy licences hitherto obtained as part of the checking process.The need to input data into a proprietary spreadsheet was time consuming and problematical to maintain.

Solution:
The Licence Bureau reporting structure resembles a series of empty boxes in a stack as high as it is wide.

All that is required is for the client to tell us how to labels the boxes. Our reports can mirror accommodate the structure of any of our clients so long as they are able to tell us which driver belongs in which ‘box’ to start with.

Obtaining driver data directly and electronically, or viewing the data online removed the need to input any data or to maintain internal records of driving licence data and simplified the process of assimilating the data in to wider reports.

3. Cash Takers

One division of this client’s group had opted to offer their drivers a cash alternative and this had become the norm for all new starters.The driving licences of these cash takers had not been inspected as it had been understood (wrongly) at the time of the move to cash alternatives that the company had no responsibility as it did not own the cars being driven.

Solution:
The Licence Bureau wrote to all the drivers and explained the Company responsibilities under s.87 (2) Road Traffic Act 1988 and obtained signed consent forms from all the drivers.

They were set up as a separate cost centre at the client’s request and were clearly identified on the client’s webpage and all reports as cash takers.