Hybrid and more integrated skills in the baggage of new fleet managers

Integration and teamwork, to manage corporate mobility across the board. The guidelines that inspire fleet managers today seem almost like a mantra. Long gone are the days of the clear-cut division between the figure responsible for purchasing and managing the fleet of vehicles and those of the mobility manager, who arranges journeys between home and the workplace, and the travel manager, who instead organises trips. With increasingly ambitious efficiency targets, the drive to bring together the various facets of corporate mobility is becoming an imperative that is difficult to escape.

"More than twenty years ago, fleet management was delegated to the heads of general services or the purchasing office, with the primary objective of obtaining the best price with respect to driver requirements," recalls Riccardo Vitelli, president of the Top Thousand Observatory, which brings together the managers of Italy's main fleets. "Since then, in many companies, the figure of the fleet manager has been born and is recognised, who today also interfaces with colleagues for sustainability objectives, budget forecasting and budgeting, and the sharing of car policies and benefits. Without excluding continuous benchmarking towards the automotive world to obtain the best conditions with respect to company needs'. Corporate mobility management is therefore interpreted in an integrated perspective, which envisages an increasingly close relationship between fleet and mobility manager.

The trend looks set to grow in the coming years, although there are already those who are exploiting synergies and coordinated approaches between the two figures. 'The growing focus on technological improvements in vehicles,' explains Matteo Giacomo Colleoni, professor of urban studies at the University of Milan-Bicocca, 'has increased the relevance of the fleet manager in the transport system. Today this figure is increasingly linked to that of the mobility manager, which has been regulated in Italy since 1998, although it has only recently become established. In 2022, only 40 per cent of companies in Italy had a mobility manager, whereas today he is present in almost half of them.

"Mobility and fleet management both make a major contribution to safer and more sustainable mobility," Colleoni continues. "Mobility management contributes to the modal shift towards more technologically efficient vehicles and infrastructure for safety and traffic reduction. While in most companies fleet and mobility management remain separate functions, there are realities that have brought the two figures together, interpreted by a single manager who can ensure greater uniformity and consistency in the management of corporate mobility as a whole. "For several years already, we have concentrated in the procurement function the responsibility for purchases related to the corporate fleet, the operational management of the fleet and travel services," says Valeria Braidotti, Head of procurement mobility services at Siemens. "Since 2018, the role of the mobility manager, which was previously the responsibility of human resources, has also been included."

The challenge is to develop the best possible mobility strategies, achieving the expected environmental, social and economic sustainability goals. Underlying the integration of fleet, mobility and travel management is the realisation that the desired efficiency can only be achieved by sharing technological and market knowledge and data on costs, fuel cards, parking and tolls. "Developing an integrated vision is crucial. A single team for the procurement and management of mobility services makes full use of every resource," Braidotti advises.