Fleet Manager: Beware of Excel!

2016-12-04T23:00:00.000Z

Companies, especially small ones, tend to consider fleet management as a trivial task. It becomes increasingly cumbersome and time-consuming when the company is looking for savings on its fixed costs or when the fleet size increases or the company expands to several locations. Naturally, at this stage, the question arises as to which tool is best suited to manage the fleet.

Since most companies and their employees are familiar with Excel and it is therefore much easier to build working tools in a known software than to introduce a new software, most companies choose it to track their fleet.

Indeed, the management of a fleet with Excel allows to list most of the important information. Generally, the managers have an Excel file for the registrations, another one for the claims, the fuel, the taxation, etc.

However, many companies experience real nightmares with this tool. If Excel allows a certain flexibility and has remarkable functionalities, badly used, it can introduce considerable administrative burdens and make any user cry. One only has to think of broken formulas, calculation errors that lead to decisions based on bad information, etc.
As an example, in 2012 JP Morgan, the large American financial holding, lost $9 billion net because of the disappearance of an Excel document; the handling of a multitude of spreadsheets and files, necessarily completed by hand, by a non-automated process, would have led to fatal errors for the company.

Of course, the Excel spreadsheet continues to be very successful when a systematic fleet management tool is needed. However, it has been criticized for many things before it can be fully trusted for the management of a large fleet.

What Excel is blamed for:

Lack of structure: The software is used in so many ways that maintaining it is very difficult;

High risk of error: Excel is a tool without automation and without self-checking; the excessive use of copy/paste functions, from one spreadsheet to another, increases the risk of error. The possibility of human errors during manual transcriptions and formatting changes is also present (0.8% to 1.8%). A mistake in an equation can be fatal;

Waste of time: Programming, formatting, reorganizing formulas and functions, testing the programming represent a huge, real waste of time.

Rigidity: Spreadsheets are not adapted to the specific requirements of a company, to the changes of procedures and to the complexity of the transactions to be programmed;

Collaborative work: By being satisfied with Excel only, the collaboration and the follow-up of the changes is very difficult. Difficulty: Difficulty to generate new reports in a dynamic way. Spreadsheets quickly become non-credible, complicated to operate and maintain.

As a result, it would be difficult to track dynamic fleet management information with an Excel file: updating of the last mileage, real vehicle costs, real fuel consumption ratios, history of contractual rental changes, etc.
With more and more items to manage (fuel, maintenance or driving), a more sophisticated tool is needed, which means that it would be difficult to track dynamic fleet management information with an Excel file: updating the last mileage, real vehicle costs, real fuel consumption ratios, history of contractual lease changes, etc.
With more and more items to manage (fuel, maintenance or driving), a more sophisticated tool is needed.

DIGIPARC, a fleet management software package, will allow fleet managers to improve their productivity and save significant amounts of money thanks to a better management of contracts, a better control of invoices and a precise and real time follow-up of the fleet.

With the richness of its functionalities, the simplicity of its use, the user-friendliness of its interface, its attractive pricing offer, the reactivity of its team, the quality of the consulting and assistance service offered and, finally, thanks to the credibility of its editor (number of vehicles already managed, experience, seniority of the editor), DIGIPARC brings important and real advantages to companies.

Indeed, it optimizes their management processes (economic and financial flows), homogenizes their information and gives it coherence (a single article file, a single customer file, etc.), promotes compliance with standards, unifies their information systems, optimizes internal communication and employee mobility, optimizes productivity, centralizes the control of the fleet, and assists in rapid decision making.