Gary Mott likens the vendor management capabilities of his company’s Fleet Guru product partially to the concept behind the cross-platform car buying and selling in the remarketing industry.

Mott, who is vice president at FLD Inc., talked with Auto Remarketing earlier this summer about the Fleet Guru vendor management system as well as the company’s OnceOVR electronic condition reporting app — both of which have major implications on the remarketing business.

Basically, Fleet Guru is an enterprise-level, cloud based fleet management software that aims to help fleets boost their efficiency. Stemming from the data of fleet operations, it can be utilized from any Web-enabled device, and its interface gives fleet managers real-time visibility of their assets, providing them a platform to manage both assets and multi-vendor relationships.

 “The Fleet Guru is a derivative of our enterprise resource system,” Mott said. “We’re taking the experience that we have in upselling, or the cross-platform selling that everyone has been talking about, to where you can be on OVE and OPENLANE, all at the same time. But what we’re doing with the Fleet Guru is totally separated from that.”

Mott said that the company is taking what it has learned from the vendors it has used in remarketing cars, “and we’re creating the Fleet Guru to be a championing software to allow you to measure your vendors based on SLA (service level agreement) & KPI (key performance indicators).

“So what we’re seeing is strategic sourcing becoming more entrenched into the fleet business. And when they’re going out to RFP – whether it’s for fuel, maintenance, subrogation, leasing itself and also remarketing – you have multiple vendors that you’re going to elect the services to. We feel the days are gone where you’re aligning yourself with one sole source vendor, especially in the remarketing industry.”

By using KPI based off the company’s enterprise system, FLD’s Fleet Guru allows fleets to essentially weight all the vendors that are providing them services.

Mott added: “So, it’s more of an overall, encompassing multi-vendor management tool, but what we’re bringing to the market first is the inventory management and remarketing piece of it. And that’s based off of solely what we’ve learned operating our own portfolio.”

Playing into that remarketing piece of Fleet Guru is the FLD’s OnceOVR app.

The company upgraded the tool this winter, giving it specialized inventory management and fleet audit features that give managers better visibility of their collateral. This is proving to be hugely beneficial to clients that are growing through mergers and acquisitions.

 Fleet managers can use OnceOVR to instantly capture critical data points while they are out in the field, leading to more accurate, legible and timely data collection, and fostering greater visibility of all the assets in a given fleet.

In other words, fleets can collect data points while cars are still in operation, giving them firm control of the inventory inspection process and the overall vitality of their fleet.

And the tool gives users a way to collect data and then use it for decision making regarding their fleet — for example, is it an optimal time to sell a vehicle and FMV (fair market value) trending?

When Auto Remarketing talked with Mott in July, the company was currently “writing the second generation” of the OnceOVR app. The first iteration was one for passenger and light duty vehicles within fleets; the next two scheduled releases targeted for late summer and early fall is for heavy-duty vehicles and material handling equipment.

“The importance of the OnceOVR app is all being driven off of data portability. If you take current practices, as far as when it comes time to know what your vehicle fleet is worth in your portfolio, you’re doing it off of a static spreadsheet. You have VIN numbers, VIN decoders, year/make/miles and location of where the vehicle is at,” Mott explained.

“What we’re doing with the OnceOVR is then allowing the driver or the region manager — whoever is enlisted with that piece of property — to do a OnceOVR on the asset and then from there, based on real market assessment of touching and feeling that vehicle, you can make the decisions on whether you want to keep that vehicle in the fleet, you want to pull that vehicle from the fleet or you want to redeploy that vehicle,” he added.

“And it’s having that information of that specific vehicle: you’ve got the photos; you get the condition report; you get the statement from the driver or manager of what that asset’s condition really is, instead of having it just a static (description of year/make/miles),” Mott continued. “You’re really getting to see what the vehicle looks and feels like.  And from there you’re making a more knowledgeable decision as far as when to remarket that vehicle.”

Mott would explain the tie-in to the Fleet Guru system: After using OnceOVR to capture the data on the vehicle, its photos, condition report and so forth, the data is portable, he said.

At that point, it can be distributed to multiple platforms – including such portals as websites for employee sale. Or as Mott put, “wherever they want to go with that data.”

So, say you’re a fleet manager and you’ve decided a vehicle is at the end of its lifecycle and needs to be redeployed, based on data you find via OnceOVR. The Fleet Guru can also aid in decision making for remarketing distribution and channel management.

“That’s where the Fleet Guru comes back in. In the remarketing portion of it, you have multiple vendors that are handling remarketing,” Mott said. “So, whether you go back to your FMC, if you have a vendor like FLD, or if you’re going right to in-lane or online — whatever those are — you can measure the results based on each vehicle that’s being remarketed through each channel.