Fleet Logistics will be responsible for managing around 850 cars on an outsourced basis and has begun implementation in Belgium where Huntsman has its European headquarters and the largest single fleet of some 320 cars.

Huntsman, which had global turnover of around $8 billion last year and employs 11,000 people across the world in multiple locations, appointed Fleet Logistics after issuing an RfP to various leasing companies and European fleet management suppliers.

The process has been driven internally by Corrado Simontacchi, Huntsman's corporate purchasing manager for goods and services, Europe, Africa and Middle East, who wanted to move to a managed fleet solution with an external fleet management provider from the company's previous arrangement with a single leasing supplier.

He explained: 'For a number of reasons we wanted to move forward from our previous fleet management model – mainly relying on a single leasing company – using TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and TCA (Total Cost of Acquisition) as benchmarks to manage all aspects of the fleet. To justify this new approach in the current environment, we also needed to deliver cost savings and reduction of our TCO by around 10-15%, as well as streamlining and consolidating existing fleet management processes and activities.

'We wanted a fleet management provider with the capability to deliver these things and to bring together disparate systems, to improve fleet operations and efficiency and, last but not least, to further improve the quality of the service provided to our drivers.

'We selected Fleet Logistics because of their market position, experience and credibility and the excellent footprint with our company as they operate in all the major European countries that we operate in,' said Mr Simontacchi.

Fleet Logistics will implement a number of chances to the Huntsman fleet, including multi-bidding to reduce acquisition costs and changing the fleet policy to introduce greener, less polluting, more fuel-efficient models.

This will also help Huntsman reach its environmental objectives of reducing carbon emissions and achieve its recently announced 20:20 Vision – a new, ten-year strategy for its EHS (Environment, Health and Safety) programme.

Under the new policy, Huntsman will allocate cars in car allowance bands based on their TCO per employee. In this way, employees will not be able to select less environmental friendly cars as this will take them outside their budgeted car allowance band.

Following a successful implementation process of the new car policy in Belgium, the company plans to roll out the new fleet management structure to the UK, the Netherlands and Italy in the first half of 2011, followed by France, Spain, Switzerland and Germany later in the year.