The 2021 Winner for The Best Transport Achievement Award, sponsored by UPS, is WFP with their project the Humanitarian Booking Hub. This year Fleet Forum received many ambitious projects, which our judging panel reduced to two to showcase during the conference: WFP’s Humanitarian Booking Hub and Costa Rica Red Cross Fleet Improvement Programme
The winner of the BTAA was decided by 108 voters during the Annual Fleet Forum Conference via the conference app and it was a very close win.
Conference attendees assessed the two finalists on:
Effectiveness and overall impact of output in the situation described
Demonstrated innovative ideas and techniques
Wider significance and applicability to other circumstances
Collaboration and consultation with (internal) stakeholders and partners
Success in overcoming technical challenges and other difficulties.
WFP’s innovative platform
The Humanitarian Booking Hub is a UN proprietary online platform powered by WFP. This project was born out of the need to transplant successful data driven passenger transportation services to the humanitarian sector. UN field operations are in large part manually driven, adding to the complexity is dealing with many decentralised organisations with different levels of digitalisation.
This project aims to solve this by allowing staff and managers to book passenger trips and run carpooling services to optimise in-field operations and fleet handling. It standardises business processes, automates request tracking, and improves service delivery through real-time monitoring of customer satisfaction. At the same time, it promotes synergies and efficiency gains. WFP initially developed the Hub as a corporate tool to run and manage its field services. Now the platform is offered as a global, inter agency service to the wider UN. The passenger mobility services of the Humanitarian Booking Hub were introduced in June of 2019, growing to cover 86 countries and over 400 locations, with 3,600 vehicles managed through the platform.
The Humanitarian Hub platform has benefitted field operations in the following ways:
Optimises the use of corporate assets
Allows automatic reporting of operational service data and KPI’s for a more effective decision making
Provides technical support to advance the UN Reform Agenda
Provided data to calculate environmental savings and CO2 emotions through increase trip consolidations and carpooling
Time savings of 24FTEs in 2020 or USD 0.9M
Cost avoidance (cash savings) of 0.3M in 2020
Streamlined best practices across countries and UN agencies
Runner up: Costa Rican Red Cross’s Improvement Programme
Walter Fallas, Fleet Manager at the Costa Rican Red Cross presented the project submitted by his organsiation. The project originated as a response to problem areas the organisation was having, such as a high vehicle crash rate, high total cost of ownership, and a lack of basic fleet management guidelines. They initiated their fleet development process in 2017, first by implementing a new Vehicle Tracking System and hiring a new fleet manager whose key assignment was the optimisation of all fleet assets across the country.
The benefits reaped from these changes include a 19% decrease in fuel consumption resulting in savings of $113,000, a 15% decrease in the total cost of fleet ownership, 100% decrease in vehicles declared a total loss, a 50% decrease in the crash rate, and most importantly a 100% decrease in driver fatalities.
Between 2017 and 2020 further actions were taken such as identifying a baseline for fleet key performance indicators, development of a nationwide data base of all authorised drivers, development of emergency vehicle driving program including an off-road driving program, and an administrative vehicle driving program mandatory for all drivers. Further efforts were put into crash investigations, reduction of idle time via driver behaviour changes, implementation of a fleet management manual including best practices from the private sector, a preventative vehicle maintenance program, achieving economies of scale through fleet standardisation, and further lowered costs for parts and maintenance due to this standardisation.
Data collection was a prerequisite for the steps that needed to be enacted to define the fleet operation baseline, KPI’s, enabling progress monitoring, an increase in evidence-based decision making, and identifying targets for improvement.
About the Best Transport Achievement Award
Launched in 2012, the Best Transportation Achievement Award is an annual award, recognising the fleet manager and the organisation that is an inspiring example for others. The purpose of the award is to highlight projects which implemented scalable and innovative solutions with demonstrable impact in one or more of the following fleet management areas: road safety, fleet safety, environmental impact, and cost efficiency. Paul Mooney, Human Resources Director at UPS, presented the award to WFP and recognised all nominees for their efforts to deliver benefits to their organisation.
Nanad Grkovic, WFP Fleet Manager in Iraq and winner of the Best Transportation Achievement Award in 2013, shared his experience after winning the award. — “This award came at a very important time for us, which was when we were proving how important for us optimise fleet management was, and how with optimised operations we can actually deliver more food assistance for the people in need.” “Being acknowledge was very rewarding for us and our teams, we have gained some confidence in building up our projects and working on innovation, optimisation, and cost efficiency.”