fleet management

In every industry, hiring is a two-pronged process. Not only does it take systems for recruiting great employees, it also requires creating cultures and systems that drivers want to continue to work in.

Here to talk to us today about recruiting, hiring, retention, and culture-building is Ozark Motor Line’s V.P. of Human Resource & Safety, Patrick Landreth.

Patrick has nearly 4 decades of experience in the world of trucking and today he lets us tap into that well of knowledge. Patrick shares what he’s seen change over the last several years, why retaining your best drivers in today’s demanding market is more important than ever, and explains the relationship between safety and success. He also shares what training and coaching programs they’ve seen have lasting results, including what technology they are leaning on and implementing fleet-wide.

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The Fleet is brought to you by our friends at Lytx. Whether you manage a fleet of five vehicles or 5,000 – Lytx is here to help. 

Lytx fleet dash cams are powered by best in class machine vision and artificial intelligence designed to help commercial fleets and drivers operate more safely, efficiently, and profitably.

Go to Lytx.com/thefleet to learn more today.

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The Fleet is created by the team at Mission. To learn more about our creative studio and network of podcasts, go to mission.org.

Every day, around the world, Amazon is pulling off a logistical feat of inventory fulfillment and next-day deliveries the likes of which has never been seen… So how do they do it?

Joining us today is Ahmad Khan, the President and Founder of Colonial Logistics, an Amazon Dedicated Service Provider – or DSP. Ahmad’s DSP runs routes in Houston and Fort-Worth, consists of over 200 vans, 450 employees, and delivers nearly 200 packages per day per van – that’s upwards of 40,000 packages per day across the company.

Today, it’s a massive operation, but when Ahmad started the company just three years ago, he had only 10 vans and an optimistic attitude. 

In today’s conversation, Ahmad guides us through that explosive growth, how he nurtured a culture of safety as the company expanded, and shares the good and the bad of being a DSP. Plus, he gives us a glimpse of what it’s like on the frontlines of package delivery.

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The Fleet is brought to you by our friends at Lytx. Whether you manage a fleet of five vehicles or 5,000 – Lytx is here to help. 

Lytx fleet dash cams are powered by best in class machine vision and artificial intelligence designed to help commercial fleets and drivers operate more safely, efficiently, and profitably.

Go to Lytx.com/thefleet to learn more today.

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The Fleet is created by the team at Mission. To learn more about our creative studio and network of podcasts, go to mission.org.

Author and futurist, Alvin Toffler, once said, “The great growling engine of change [is] technology.”

If there is one thing we can count on in the years and decades to come, it’s that technology will continue to augment and redesign everything we do -- and this includes how we operate and manage fleets.

But exactly what technology can fleet managers expect to see in the future? And what can they do today to prepare for those technologies of tomorrow?

Joining me today is Neil Cawse, CEO & Founder of Geotab, a Candian-based company that specializes in providing analytics-driven fleet management solutions. Neil founded Geotab in 2000, and while he now leads the fast-growing company as CEO, he is still very much an engineer at heart. 

In today’s conversation, Neil shares his predictions of the future and what these changes mean for consumers, drivers, and managers. You’ll hear about a wide range of technologies; from 5G and cloud, to new and improved electric vehicles, to telematics, ML, and AI, and much more.

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The Fleet is brought to you by our friends at Lytx. Whether you manage a fleet of five vehicles or 5,000 – Lytx is here to help. 

Lytx fleet dash cams are powered by best in class machine vision and artificial intelligence designed to help commercial fleets and drivers operate more safely, efficiently, and profitably.

Go to Lytx.com/thefleet to learn more today.

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The Fleet is created by the team at Mission. To learn more about our creative studio and network of podcasts, go to mission.org.

Whether you manage a small local fleet of delivery vans or lead a nationwide fleet of hundreds, mitigating risk and encouraging safety are top priorities for fleet managers.

But as a manager, how do you make sure those priorities become reality?

Here to help answer that question is Stephen Darbonne, a safety manager at Abacus Plumbing, Air Conditioning, and Electrical. 

Steve’s unique career path began as an aspiring athletic trainer, led to 5-years of service in the Army, and then to a career in emergency medical services after he got out. In today’s conversation, Steve gives a behind-the-scenes look at life as an EMS field and operations supervisor and how those experiences influence him at Abacus today.

Steve also shares his experiences implementing new systems of safety management, and how to stop risky driving behaviors -- including how technology can identify those behaviors in real-time.

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The Fleet is brought to you by our friends at Lytx. Whether you manage a fleet of five vehicles or 5,000 – Lytx is here to help. 

Lytx fleet dash cams are powered by best in class machine vision and artificial intelligence designed to help commercial fleets and drivers operate more safely, efficiently, and profitably.

Go to Lytx.com/thefleet to learn more today.

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The Fleet is created by the team at Mission. To learn more about our creative studio and network of podcasts, go to mission.org.

Every manager knows that when you implement fresh systems, new requirements, or updated protocols... employees usually aren’t ready to conform right away.

Nowhere is this more true than in fleet safety.

Managing safety and mitigating risk isn’t easy, and it’s even harder when your company’s cultures and mindsets aren’t open to those changes.

As longtime CEO of Jetco Delivery and now Executive VP of The GTI Group, Brian Fielkow has decades of experience not only leading and running fleets, but helping transform fleets inside out. And as Brian shares today, creating a culture that promotes safety and accountability starts with the people behind the wheel, not just the technology under the hood.

On today’s episode, Brian talks about what it means to build a safety culture, how to empower drivers through that culture, and technology’s role in it all. Plus, be sure to stay tuned to learn the weirdest item Brian’s ever had to deliver.

To continue the conversation,  please contact Brian at brian@jetcodelivery.com or feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn.

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The Fleet is brought to you by our friends at Lytx. Whether you manage a fleet of five vehicles or 5,000 – Lytx is here to help. 

Lytx fleet dash cams are powered by best in class machine vision and artificial intelligence designed to help commercial fleets and drivers operate more safely, efficiently, and profitably.

Go to Lytx.com/thefleet to learn more today.

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The Fleet is created by the team at Mission. To learn more about our creative studio and network of podcasts, go to mission.org.

One of the most pressing challenges facing fleets is safety on the road. That’s why today, we’ve invited on a man with an extensive background in dealing with the problem of distracted driving - first as a police officer enforcing the laws of the road and second as a lieutenant working to mitigate distracted driving among his officers.

Today’s guest is Michael Crabb, a Lieutenant of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, where he heads the Traffic Enforcement Section and Government & Legislative Affairs Unit.

Mike has been with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office for over 30 years, but it wasn’t until the last few years that he began implementing technology to help his officers avoid the same distractions their civilian counterparts do.

Today, Mike shares his experiences rolling out new systems of safety management with his officers, some of the shocking things he realized about his own driving habits after doing so, and the results he and his office are now seeing after widespread adaptation.

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The Fleet is brought to you by our friends at Lytx. Whether you manage a fleet of five vehicles or 5,000 – Lytx is here to help. 

Lytx fleet dash cams are powered by best in class machine vision and artificial intelligence designed to help commercial fleets and drivers operate more safely, efficiently, and profitably.

Go to Lytx.com/thefleet to learn more today.

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The Fleet is created by the team at Mission. To learn more about our creative studio and network of podcasts, go to mission.org.

On this episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast, I welcomed back Chris Wolfe. Chris is the CEO of PowerFleet - a global mobile asset solution provider. Chris was on a previous episode of the show talking about PowerFleet, and how it helps organisations manage their fleets of vehicles. He reached out to me to talk about how he's seeing a trend in fleets to electric vehicles.

This should come as a surprise to no one especially given the recent Consumer Reports study confirming that “drivers of electric vehicles are saving an average of 50% on maintenance and repair over the life of a vehicle compared to owners of gas-powered vehicles” And electric vehicles being a topic I love, I immediately asked Chris to come on and chat about that.

Chris has a rich history in this space (having bought one of the very first Tesla Roadsters) , some of which I managed to tease out of him during this chat. He also talked knowledgeably about the space, and the latest trends in it.

The audio quality on this podcast is not great at times because while we were interviewing there was someone outside Chris' home office using a leaf blower (unfortunately, not an electric one) and so that interfered with his sound.

Other than that, we had fun putting this podcast together, I hope you enjoy listening to it. If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

To learn more about how supply chain leaders improve end-to-end supply chain visibility, download the research study of 1,000 COO’s and Chief Supply Chain Officers – “

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

• Lorcan Sheehan
• Krishna Kumar
• Olivier Brusle
• Alicia Farag
• Joël VANDI
• Luis Olavarria
• Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

Welcome to The Fleet, the #1 industry podcast for fleet managers and their teams.

Whether your fleet is five vehicles or five thousand, a family-owned construction firm, a local landscaping business, or a nationwide bus service, The Fleet will keep you in touch with the latest technology and people innovating in fleet management today.

You'll hear conversations with leading industry experts, drivers on the frontlines, and executives across the country. Whether you’re in safety, operations, HR, or the corner office, each episode of The Fleet equips managers with the knowledge, technological insights, industry updates, news, and trends they need to manage fleets safely and cost-effectively. 

New episodes release every Wednesday. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Fleet is created by Mission.org and brought to you by Lytx.

SAP released a new product on Wednesday of this week called the Digital Vehicle Hub DVH. To find out what that is, and what I might want one for (!) I invited Mukund Rao, a Director in SAP's Automotive Business Unit, and Andreas Klaschka SAP's Digital Vehicle Hub Solution Owner, to come on the podcast to explain all.

The DVH is a repository for all the data coming off the sensors we find increasingly in cars. This is a fascinating idea with use cases for vehicle re-sale value, insurance, and fleet management, amongst other topics.

This was a cool podcast on a topic I am really interested in (automotive - especially because it is being so disrupted right now). I hope you enjoy it too

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

To learn how supply chain leaders improve end-to-end supply chain visibility, download the research study of 1,000 COO’s and Chief Supply Chain Officers – “Surviving and Thriving How Supply Chain Leaders minimize risk and maximize opportunities” (https://www.sap.com/cmp/dg/supply-chain-leaders/index.html)

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Digital Supply Chain solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/digitalsupplychain and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

• Lorcan Sheehan
• Krishna Kumar
• Olivier Brusle
• Alicia Farag
• Joël VANDI
• Luis Olavarria
• Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

This is the 46th episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast, and I spoke with Rushil Goel. Rushil is Vice President and General Manager Fleet Management at Samsara.

Samsara are an Industrial IoT company with over 15,000 customers around the world. Much of their work in data capture is in the areas of vehicle/driver data, and also in industrial process controls.

Recently Samsara released the results of an independent study of electric vehicles which showed that the efficiency and cost savings associated with operating electric vehicles are large drivers in their adoption.

Being an Electric Vehicle owner, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I think you will too - do let me know your thoughts, by dropping me a comment on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Now we are in June, I am trialling a new feature on the podcast - listeners stories. If you have a cool supply chain story you'd like featured on the show, send it to me via email (tom.raftery @ sap.com), or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Digital Supply Chain solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/digitalsupplychain and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

• Lorcan Sheehan
• Krishna Kumar
• Olivier Brusle
• Alicia Farag
• Joël VANDI
• Luis Olavarria
• Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

On this episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast, I spoke with Simon Lonsdale, co-founder and head of sales and strategy for Amply Power (@AmplyPower on Twitter). Amply is a US based company in the commercial fleet space, specialising in managing the fuelling of electric vehicles (be they cars, vans, trucks, buses, or any other type of commercial electric vehicle).

Simon spoke about how Amply's business model is a pay per mile driven one, how Amply can help its customers drive down the cost of transportation for organisations by intelligently managing the charging of its electric vehicles, demand side management, and where available applying carbon credits to the electricity used for the vehicles.

We had a fascinating conversation, and I particularly liked Simon's point near the end about the extra value Amply can bring its customers, by unlocking the feeling data. Something not available for users of internal combustion engines - listen for yourselves, and let me know what you think.

If you have a comment of question, feel free to send it to me via email (tom.raftery @ sap.com), or simply send me a message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Digital Supply Chain solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/digitalsupplychain and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

• Lorcan Sheehan
• Krishna Kumar
• Olivier Brusle
• Alicia Farag
• Joël VANDI
• Luis Olavarria
• Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

My guest on this episode of the Digital Supply Chain podcast is Colin Sutherland, EVP Sales and Marketing for fleet tracking platform Geotab. 

Geotab invited me to give the closing keynote at their Geotab Connect 2020 event this year in San Diego. I took the opportunity to bring my recording equipment with me to talk to Colin about Geotab, what it does, how it is connected to Digital Supply Chains, and how  Geotab can help companies become more sustainable.

At the event Geotab launched their Electric Vehicle Suitability Assessment tool which is a tool that allows fleet managers to analyse their fleets of vehicles across dimensions like workloads, trip profiles, and so on to recommend which vehicles in the fleet can be best replaced by Electric Vehicles, so I was anxious to hear more about this from Colin.

To kick off I asked Colin to introduce himself, which he did at 00:34

Then at 00:51 I asked Colin how Geotab can help organisations' supply chains

At 02:32 I asked Colin if people were averse to the solution because it is cloud based, or was this an issue at all

At 03:20 I asked Colin how this can help company's with their sustainability initiatives

At 04:25 I brought up the newly announced EVSA and asked Colin to talk about that

Then at 06:20 I asked Colin what is the next thing Geotab is concentrating on

Finally at 07:38 I asked Colin where people can find out more about Geotab and Colin strongly recommended people check out their interesting and insightful blog.

Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

• Lorcan Sheehan
• Krishna Kumar
• Olivier Brusle
• Alicia Farag
• Joël VANDI
• Luis Olavarria
• Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

We cap our mobility mini-series from a different perspective: that of Mike Granoff, Managing Partner of Maniv Mobility, a venture capital firm that specializes in...mobility and the future of transportation. As an investor, Mike has to look at the entire mobility landscape, and his success and reputation are not... 'riding' on a single solution.

We kick off the podcast with our trademark "why on earth are you doing this?", and the answer will surprise you. It will also explain why Mike takes a very broad and strategic view of the disruption to mobility and transportation. The code word, he says, is diversification: different ways of powering vehicles, shared transportation, buying miles traveled rather than cars, leveraging different modes of transportation. A broad-ranging, digitally-enabled transformation of a transportation model that had remained static for over a century.

We discuss whether ride-sharing platforms like Uber and Lyft are actually adding to traffic congestion and whether they will continue to do so; whether the hype on driverless cars is too far ahead of reality; cybersecurity issues; and how to address the biggest market failure in this space—the failure to price road space appropriately.

It's a fascinating, broad-ranging conversation that ties together the ideas, innovations and disruptions we discussed in the first three episodes of this miniseries. A brilliant way to take stock of how mobility is changing, and what the future of our mobility will look like.

Enjoy the episode, and please share it on social media and with friends and colleagues!

Our guest today is Sampo Hietanen, the CEO of a Finnish company called MAAS Global. MaaS stands for Mobility as a Service, and they are the makers of Whim, an app-based platform for MaaS. Whim provides a single way to access all forms of mobility - everything from cars to trains, scooters, bikes and buses, through a subscription.
Sampo's influence extends way beyond Finland, in fact he is widely viewed as the ideological father of mobility as a service. As you’ll see from the conversation, Sampo has big dreams for how we might get from place A to B to Z, what it means for car ownership and the car industry, what it means for cities, and urban regions, and what it means for the environment. If you listened to our previous conversations in this miniseries,  you’ll recall Israel Duanis explained that  Fleetonomy was all about optimizing the use of fleets of vehicles and that Shai Suzan explained that WayCare was all about optimizing the flow of traffic. MaaS' vision includes both of these, I think , and more; their dream is about optimizing the experience that people have as they travel  through and within a region.

We hope you enjoy the episode - please share it with other like minded curious people, and write us a review on Apple Podcast.

With today’s episode, we kick off a miniseries on “mobility.” In today’s tech parlance and in city planning parlance, mobility includes a bunch of different issues, but they have one thing in common: they shape the quality of our everyday lives. How we get to work, to school or to our friends’ house can make the difference between a pleasant daily city experience and a barely tolerable one. And one way or another, it’s going to change because of technology. So  the “Mobility” umbrella covers lots of things, including autonomous vehicles (AVs), but actually we're not covering those directly in this mobility miniseries. But artificial intelligence plays a role in other parts of mobility, like, for example, fleet management, for which you can imagine optimization algorithms would be crucial. The company we discuss on today's episode is called Fleetonomy, and they are building fleet management systems specifically with autonomy in mind. Fleetonomy’s offering is designed to maximize vehicle utilization, which is the key to fleet management. It does this by leveraging data from the car itself, from the fleet owner’s data, and multiple public sources, and then layering on machine learning algorithms. 

Fleet management is part of that landscape of mobility, but both the domain and that word include other forms of getting around. Mobility includes e-scooters, ride shares,bike shares, electric vehicles and their charging stations, traffic management, road congestion pricing, and more. In addition to Fleetonomy, this miniseries will include Waycare, a traffic management company, and MaaS Global, makers of Whim, the first mobility-as-a-service provider. When you put all these together, you can begin to envision a really different transportation future, one in which how we move around, when, with whom, in what mode, and maybe even to where, can be dramatically different. Given how crucial mobility is to economic activity, this sector’s transformations can really reverberate widely.

Once we’ve aired all three episodes, Marco and I will add a brief post-game conversation discussing mobility and the three companies together. We hope you enjoy and thanks for being curious.

P.S. Please share the episode with a friend
P.P.S. Here's a 1 minute tutorial on how to write a review and give us a rating on Apple Podcast.