Philippa Gyles, head of fleet, ISS Facility Services Australia and New Zealand was a keynote speaker at the fleet conference of the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia (IPWEA) in Brisbane during March.
She talked about her experience at Toyota, Mazda, Range Rover and Avis and how they prepared her for taking on the newly created job as fleet manager at ISS. ISS provides cleaning, food and technical services to some 400 workplaces in Australia and New Zealand.
Gyles career spans roles in fleet procurement and fleet analysis at car rental group Avis, where the core of the job was to have the right car in the right place at the right time. With 25,000 vehicles and demand affected by seasonality among other things it was a complex role.
Prior to Avis, Gyles had stints with automotive brands Toyota, Mazda and Jaguar Range Rover. At Toyota Fleet Management some of the key learnings were around operating and novated leases and residual values. Her first fleet car was a Toyota Corolla driving around South Australia and into the Northern Territory training the Toyota dealer network in its TFM software.
“The best thing I ever learned was the residual value side of things,” Gyles said in a recount of her path to corporate fleet leader.” Gyles prized the focus TFM pointed at monitoring the market and assessing risk. She recalled at Avis the misfit of their used sedans into a market buying SUVs.
Before Gyles joined ISS in 2023, at some point ISS had axed the fleet manager role, only to realise the risk to the organisation not actively managing assets was. Enter Gyles in her first role as leader of a team tasked with managing the fleet.
Wrangling the fleet and control of it was important for the ISS brand as well as cost containment and everything else.
Gyles told a story of a very old ISS branded vehicle dedicated to carting a pressure washer around, attending an event with 90,000 patrons.
“We’ve got no idea where it was last serviced but our people are driving it up and down ramps. I had to ask does it go on public roads?” she recounted saying.
Gyles spelled out the critical role of caring for vehicles for valued safety and brand goals. Good fleet management was also crucial to achieving business goals, said Gyles.
“We’re actually a business partner to so many different facets of the organisation, to finance particularly.”
