The Final 3

Each issue, we ask a fleet professional to share three keys to fleet success.

This issue’s Final 3 participant is George Survant, senior fleet director at Time Warner Cable Inc., a cable and telecommunications company headquartered in New York with over 20,000 assets in its fleet.

#1. Listen to your customer.
“Often, customers will come and ask for this or that type of spec in a vehicle or piece of equipment. But when we dialogue with them and listen, we begin to understand what the real pain points are. And when we learn why they want something, there’s often an opportunity for us to recommend a better solution they might not have considered when they first made the request.”

#2. Know how your fleet is doing at all times.
“If you don’t continually stay on top of how your fleet is performing, you can’t manage it very effectively. For example, we know that we have 20,235 vehicles. Our incident failure rate is 2.7 percent; in other words, 2.7 percent of the fleet is unavailable on any given day. Our average burn rate for fuel is running about 11.2 mpg across all spectrums of the fleet. We anticipate burning 24 million gallons of fuel a year and driving 256 million miles. It’s about always having your finger on the pulse of your fleet, because that’s the only way you can catch outliers or discover new opportunities for improvements.”

#3. Act on the data to manage your fleet more efficiently.
“Make sure your data is good and then use it. There are a lot of counterintuitive things that people do in this business, or legacy things that they do that, frankly, don’t produce good results. Accurate data can give you the insight you need to come up with a tightly focused response to a very specific problem.”