Interview with Ron Katz
Chevin Fleet Solutions focuses on providing fleet information and data management systems to capture, consolidate and pull together everything having to do with the fleet from acquisition through disposal. Our goal is to help our clients more efficiently manage, drive down cost, and effectively increase the utilization of their fleet with the long term goal of getting more value out of their assets, whether that is in transportation, in the public sector or in large commercial and private sector organizations.
Do you provide the software under a licensing arrangement or do they access a centralized database?
Are you customizing your software to meet specific applications and is that what most of your clients are doing?
What makes Chevin unique and differentiates us in the marketplace are primarily three things. One is that our software is asset centric, meaning that everything that impacts a vehicle throughout its lifecycle is captured and aggregated at that asset level. Because the asset sits within the organization structure that’s accommodated within the application, system users can easily view, sort and parse any fleet related data they need to more effectively manage their fleet. Secondly, our software is completely user definable, allowing us to configure the software to meet very specific processes. That’s an important reason as to why we can work with large public sector, country, city as well as large global corporations that might have distinctly different fleet management practices. Lastly, we offer true web-based software that can be easily and securely deployed to unlimited users, anywhere at any time. All of Chevin’s clients are interested in reducing operating costs and enhancing productivity, but the individual way that they go about this can be very, very different.
What is happening in the public sector marketplace?
When Chevin founded our North America operation six plus years ago, we felt that the public sector would be an important market for us, and it’s turned out to be very much the case. Today, many public entities, municipalities, counties, towns and states are anxious and often even mandated to manage their fleets more like a business than a cost center. It used to be that costs weren't all that important to these organizations, but rather customer service ruled the day, and because of environmental, regulatory and obviously financial restraints that are going on today, these fleets are now being put under a tremendous pressure to really manage their operations much more effectively. As a result, they tend to be investing in technology like enterprise fleet management information systems to help them get their arms around the necessary information to manage it more effectively.
Let's talk about the mandates that are being imposed on public fleets. What specific aspects of your software system help them do that and how are you working with these fleets to deal with their fuel management issues?
As a global software provider with decades of experience, we've been dealing with these issues for a long time. In the rest of the world, CO2 emissions and complex compliance initiatives regarding alternative fuel and green fleet programs have been in existence for many, many years.
Our core competency is data consolidation and the presentation of complex business critical fleet operating metrics in a simple and intuitive manner. Fuel management is all about automatically capturing complete fuel transaction details, then summarizing these countless details into meaningful statistics such as what fuel is being used, how much of fuel is used, what vehicles is the fuel being utilized in, and how do these details roll up within the organizational structure.
More specifically, we don't just do fuel management or alternative fuel management, but rather we provide powerful tools to aggregate complete fuel data so that our clients can report meet federal, state or legislative mandates.
Of course we also support additional mandates as they pertain to drivers, emissions, certifications as well as inspections. We've been able to successfully carve out a rather large niche for ourselves because our software gives fleets strategic as well as tactical tools they need to more effectively manage their fleet.
Ron Katz is the Vice President of North American Sales for Chevin Fleet Solutions, a global provider of Fleet Management Information Systems. With more than 30 years of fleet and maintenance management experience, Ron is responsible for Business Development, Marketing and strategic product development for Chevin’s suite of flexible enterprise fleet management information systems.
Contact: ron@chevinfleet.com
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