The 2018 Fleet Forum Best Transport Achievement Award has been awarded to Marie Stopes International for The Global Fleet Project. Jonathan Baker, Global Fleet Manager, accepted the award on behalf of Marie Stopes International.
The 2018 Fleet Forum Best Transport Achievement Award has been awarded to Marie Stopes International for The Global Fleet Project. Jonathan Baker, Global Fleet Manager, accepted the award on behalf of Marie Stopes International.
As an organisation, Marie Stopes recognised insufficient fleet performance management visibility and controls. They envisioned an opportunity to change the way its people on all levels viewed vehicles – from means of transport, to a driver of service delivery productivity.
Mission
The Global Fleet Project was not to be about vehicles, but about influencing sustainable change to business as usual. The mission was to create the changes necessary for country teams to be the owners of their own success – through better use and controls of their transportation resources across the Marie Stopes International network.
The project plan set out an ambitious three-year Global Fleet Strategy covering 2016-2018. The goals were defined as:
increased service delivery productivity;
reduced fleet costs;
increased fleet safety and;
increased quality of data reporting.
Strategies and measures were established to achieve these four project goals.
Execution of the project
Originally it was planned to rollout to 7-8 country programmes during each of the 3 years of the project. A change in the plan was decided for year-three of the project as instead of driving forward with new rollouts. Marie Stopes decided to go back to the programmes where they had rolled out during the first two years, successfully achieving one benchmark before progressing to the next, which has been key to achieving the mission of the project.
Being a change management project, success was found through multiple planned out strategies, which included: keeping board members informed, have them committed and supportive of the project. Marie Stopes engaged in external support from recruiting a Global Fleet Manager, involved project plan consultancy and seeking support from peers. They installed audits, KPI’s, job profiles, vehicle tracking tools to name a few. Also they looked out for their drivers through health checks, creating a sense of team and giving them trainings and technical instructions.
Conclusion
The outcome of the project has been highly successful. Marie Stopes offered to share the results with companies that are going through the same exercise at the moment and they developed a supporting information package for companies who like to know more. The project was very well received.