Technology is having major impacts on how vehicle fleets are being run, to find out how the world is changing for major vehicle leasing companies MotorTradeNews spoke to Simon West-Oliver, Director of the leading player the space, Dirve Software Solutions.
West-Oliver sets the scene. In recent years many organisations moved their strategies to intranet-based solutions and that had an impact on the solution types used in our business. Now lots of organisations are seeking to de-risk themselves out of those environments, using the internet for host provision, with solutions hosted by a third party or provider instead of putting them on their own topology. In this way they avoid having to bring in their own support people and analysts, pushing the responsibility for those functions back onto the third parties.
With the emergence of cloud technology, that will become the preferred platform for vast volumes of number crunching. Whereas platforms once had to run within their own infrastructures, now they no longer have to. Organisations increasingly want to use the functionality of their preferred management packages without the need to set up their own internal support networks.
This is particularly pertinent for businesses that have grown by acquisition. Many are characterised by mainframe environments where products have been bolted on as they’ve gone along. This leads to security and stability issues, compounded by the need to use middleware between the database and the end user offerings. Being Oracle-based, DRIVE does away with the need for middleware. Ultimately middleware merely serves to reduce stability, slow down functionality and creates an extra support requirement. It comes down to the choice between best-of-breed and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for a cradle-to-grave solution.
In client discussions, DRIVE finds that many of them are using multiple platforms and product sets to supply business functionality. Some of these organisations are using as many as 25 front-end solutions and different databases. This prompts the need for multiple support and potentially compromises security. It’s a high-cost, high-risk strategy that’s often foisted on organisations because of acquisitions. Once companies start to merge, a single IT strategy becomes all the more critical and necessary.
These organisations may have acquired another that went best of breed and they suddenly find themselves faced with a host of different offerings that provide different functionality. The challenge is to find a product which can provide all of the various functions required and deliver it in a single offering. This is one area in which DRIVE is a strong performer.
In migrating from legacy systems it is essential to understand the client’s business and how they envisage the change and implementation; and the derisking of that implementation.
The closer you can get to a standard product offering to suit re-engineered or exiting business processes, the more effective it will be.
At the heart of this is the need for organisations to invest in upfront consultancy to understand what their business truly needs, over and above whatever it is they think they might want based on a wide-ranging wish list. This front end risk is always the one that’s neglected. It’s vital that the vendor understands what the client needs, for their part the client needs to be prepared to make a greater commitment to up front consultancy to be sure they get what they need.
DRIVE uses a mini implementation of its system called Test DRIVE which sits inside the client’s existing system to allow them to see if DRIVE is right for them both function-wise and business-wise. This allows both parties to understand how each of them works and to establish how they can work together, and you then end up with a defined project.
By going through this process a realistic timescale can be set and an understanding of what will be delivered and what the implementation and management cost will be. There then follows a ‘proof of concept’ prior to the main implementation.
Where organisations can fail in their adoption of new technologies is in supposing they know their business processes really well until they peel the layers back in the consultation process to find that things are not quite as they appeared on the surface.
For companies looking to update or migrate fleet management systems, money invested with a variety of vendors to establish what they do and what they need to do to meet your real business needs. It can be a costly mistake to ask for tenders before understanding the vendors’ offerings in enough detail to know if it’s right for them.
Ultimately it comes down to establishing what’s important; often what a company has on their wish list isn’t actually what’s required, now or in the future. Failing to do so potentially inhibits future flexibility.
Often smaller solutions vendors are a better bet because you can understand the supplier and their strategies holistically. An understanding of functionality and establishment of compatibility are key too. Both parties need common ground to work from in both people and technology. The dream team needs to have players from both sides, and this is something that can only be established by upfront consultancy.
