Following on from the announcement that BBC had awarded the contract to Total Accident Management last week, J. Sainsbury have awarded the management of their 3.5 ton fleet to another fleet management specialist, Fraikin.
Covering the supermarket giant’s South East online home delivery network, Fraikin will be in control of 220 commercial vehicles in total, looking after each van’s ‘first aid’ as well as dealing with the organisations needs to make claims on their van insurance policies delivering the swiftest possible down-time imagineable.
Why outsource fleet management services?
If your business grows beyond your wildest dreams, especially in the sectors of distribution, home delivery or automotive market, so will your fleet of commercial vehicles, meaning more road time, more mileage and most certainly a heftier van insurance bill, each term.
With so much extra time spent on the actual maintenance of the vehicles delivering your product, it can make commercial sense to hire someone to take on this aspect of your business.
What cost savings for hiring fleet management?
Do not be fooled into thinking that fleet management specialists do it for nothing. You already know the man hours, as well as expenditure per van, before you start looking to someone who has an in depth knowledge of the market place to take on the fleet responsibility.
You will have this cost as an actual set figure in your budget, and visibility to where you will save in three key areas which, if not curtailed, can run to a substantial figure that you may not have factored into your profitability.
Although most fleet management specialists are not body repairers, mechanics or commercial van insurers in their own rite, they do put a whole lot more business to these types of organisations, enabling cost-savings; these discounts can be quite substantial when you think that this volume of business is done, not at a bar over a pint but almost all the way to the top at senior management, if not executive level, taking it far away from a 5-10% discount of any trade price list that may be in existence.
However, fleet management systems are not all about big business. Certainly, the term ‘fleet’ management does give the clue away a little; you do have to have a volume of vehicles to whet their appetite. If you do have multiple vehicles on the road and cannot stand dealing with your van insurance broker or bodyshop repairers and find yourself moving insurance for your fleet and maintenance contracts every year, you may want to consider outsourcing your fleet management as a viable option.
In the Sainsbury example in the lead, Fraikin have committed to providing a first aid kit for each van, containing replacable items such as light bulbs that savvy drivers could replace themselves, rather than face steep breakdown callouts or van insurance claims for what are, in essence, the simplest of tasks when you know how.
Over and above servicing the 23 stores in the south east that Fraikin have undertaken with this contract, they have promised 90-minute response maximum for any of mechanical failure – you have to have some friends in high places to be able to extract the promise of that capability in any auto circle.
This means identifying the driver’s location, contacting the breakdown and assessing whether its viable to do so with the van insurance cover or just write it off as a sundry expense if the cost of repair is negligible – that takes some doing in a hour and a half, especially over a 220 vehicle fleet. Just imagine what Total Access have undertaken looking after the Beebs envisaged 24,000 commercial vehicle fleet! Gives you a headache before even picking up the phone.
If you’ve been quoted a price by a fleet management firm and want to see if you can get your van insurance any cheaper, please feel free to use our van insurance comparison facility, here on cheapvaninsurance.co.uk
