If you’ve been in the fleet or automotive industries for longer than five years, you’ll remember the days when you could order a vehicle and expect delivery in a few months. You only needed a vague asset replacement plan for your fleet based on a fleet policy using kilometres, hours or age.
In the Plant and Vehicle Management Manual (PVMM) from IPWEA Fleet, it outlines the best practice for Fleet Managers which includes developing a Fleet Asset Management Plan (a strategy document for your fleet) and a 10 year asset replacement plan for all fleet assets.
When I talk with Fleet Managers that have 10 year asset replacement plans, not much has changed since the pandemic started in 2020. They still know which vehicles or equipment will be replaced in 2023 because they ordered it 12 months ago by working with their supplier partners.
Planning with customers and placing orders long before the old car need replacing is something the fleet team at Ford have focused on, and everyone reaped the benefits during the Ranger model changeover in 2022. I got an insight into reasons why it worked so well when talking to the Ford fleet team at an event on Melbourne during April.
“It’s really interesting challenge,” says Ambrose Henderson, Director of Customer Experience, Growth and Sales at Ford. “I spent a lot of time in sales, and you know, pre COVID it was all about how many you can sell and where’s your next order.”
“And now we’re on the opposite side, we’re all about effort and focus about managing customers, because we know that, you know, we just can’t get enough to deliver on the demand. And so what our team has done is a wonderful job, and really trying to plan out demand.”
“None of us have had to do that in the past, generally, right? But we’re actually planning it out. So we’re sitting with customers going, our order cycle is generally about five months, so let’s plan out five to 12 months of your needs, so that we can actually go and procure that and we can work with you. We set up the body builder needs and all those sorts of things. So it’s just a completely different world.”
Christine Wagner, General Manager of Fleet and Upfitting, shared some insights into the range of accessories that were launched with the new Ranger and how planning and working with everyone in the supply chain helped fleets get the new model up and running quickly.
“The other things that that we did on the launch of this set of programs (Ranger and Everest) was a full range of accessories which we did through the ARB arrangement,” says Wagner.
“It works really well, particularly for government customers. They’re effectively selecting something in the Ford warranty, backed by Ford.”
“Typically when you engineer a vehicle, you’ve only got so many engineers available to you. So you get them to design the vehicle, then they do the accessories last and the accessories always trailing right? At this time we had an accessories partner all the way along.”
“So you were able to provide all of those things that fleet customers need from the get go. So that I think is a major feather in the cap, and made a big difference. And the other thing was access for a lot of body builders early on, which made a big difference.
“If you go back to the early launch material that was supplied on Ranger, there was a real focus around explaining the customer path aspect. And one of the things that people made a point of doing on this one is, we know that a typical customer will hold on to the body for at least two vehicle cycles, in which case, what you want is you want a body that can actually move pretty seamlessly from what we would call a P375, the old Ranger, on to this new one so that you’ve got a relatively seamless transition or minimal modification, and you can get more use out of your body. So that was also in consideration. So I think the body builder aspect, and the accessory supply were also things that added to the benefit of making the vehicle a strong proposition for fleets right from the start.”
“The team was very proactive in that,” confirms Henderson. “And this is, you know, part of us really focusing on things that we’re really good at, and we can deliver great solutions, rather than try and do everything for everybody.”
“We know we’re really good in these particular areas, we do very well on them. There’s very big fleet business in these areas. So our team was out really proactively with every one of our partners in the fleet space, talking about the new model, what would it mean, in terms of supply? What would it mean in terms of changes to their specific needs, all those sort of things.”
“We also have what we call a special vehicle engineering team, which is where Christine referenced, it’s about having some expertise on call to be able to talk to and say this is what you need to do to change the body. The car is set up in this way, that will mean that these certain things, or here the new technologies we never used to have, let’s make sure that you understand how they’re going to work.”
