And the imminent roll-out of a range of highly sophisticated analytical tools by ARI Fleet UKTM to clients, which include Home Retail Group, is anticipated to provide new opportunities for additional savings to be made.

Remarkably, Home Retail Group’s fleet maintenance costs on a pence per mile basis are lower today than they were 18 years ago with the average maintenance costs per vehicle down by a massive £93 a year.

Today maintenance pence per mile costs on the 1,108 company car fleet are 2.20p compared with 2.33p when the fleet numbered 226 cars in 1995. Taking inflation at 2.5% per annum into account it equates to an estimated total maintenance cost saving this year of £400,000.

ARI Fleet UK, which was previously known as Fleet Support Group, has maintenance managed the Home Retail Group fleet on an outsourced basis over those 18 years.

Peter Weston, Transport manager at Home Retail Group, the parent company of Argos, Habitat and Homebase, said: ‘It is amazing that our pence per mile figures are better than 18 years ago.

‘Working with ARI, we are totally confident that the company is spending our money as though it was their money and is constantly monitoring every penny to ensure we receive the best value,’ he added.

‘Today, vehicle reliability is excellent so maintenance costs are easy to predict. A good partner such as ARI will grip and control costs and always continuously inform and advise by trend tracking,’ he concluded.

Chief among ARI Fleet UK’s new management tools is an exclusive fleet analytic engine that processes data 3,600 times faster than any system on the market today. ARI has already rolled out the capability to more than 40 customers in North America and Home Retail Group is among the first UK customers set to benefit.   

ARI Fleet UK managing director, Mark Bryan said: ‘Our exclusive technology is a game-changer in the fleet business. Data is interpreted and reports are available instantly on a customer’s computer dashboard. Data processing that used to take seven-and-a-half hours can be done in mere seconds.’

The powerful in-memory technology enables fleets to act on information as it happens, thus revolutionising decision-making, dramatically increasing the speed of existing processes and allowing access to large amounts of data in shorter periods of time.

‘The ground-breaking technology puts all of the data needed to generate reports “in memory” making vast amounts of analytical detail on any aspect of a fleet’s operation available in milliseconds.

‘Our customers can drill down into finite detail to examine overall costs and individual areas of expenditure by vehicle and driver and undertake their own benchmarking and trend analysis. The power and speed of the technology is incredible and our customers will benefit from the new capabilities it provides,’ Mr Bryan continued.

Having quick access to their fleet’s information enables fleet operators to easily identify areas of cost and build a predictive analysis of potential future areas of expenditure. As a result, a range of targeted initiatives can be introduced to drive down identified cost areas.

‘Having strict service maintenance and repair controls together with a zero tolerance approach to unauthorised work, while using technology to integrate and monitor all expenditures – including routine maintenance, breakdown and recovery, tyres and ancillary costs and information from in-vehicle telemetry devices – empowers a fleet manager and allows for the easy identification of all out of the ordinary costs, which enables appropriate interventions to be activated when necessary,’ he concluded.