Fleet management as a Business

The automotive industry has witnessed significant transformation with technological innovations focused on driving convenience and comfort for consumers. Besides enhancing customer experience, companies in the automotive business have worked extensively to minimize the risk associated with productivity, improve efficiency, and comply with government regulations. They have started looking at diversifying revenue streams and enhancing vehicle investments, leading to the growth of new avenues like fleet management.

Fleet management as a business provides a wide range of comprehensive mobility solutions in the form of short-term rentals, long-term leases, and pool management to companies. It empowers companies to expand their core competencies from vehicle management to total mobility management solutions. And from a customer’s standpoint, it allows users to assess every transport option easily and make a choice based on cost, speed, and comfort.

About Leaseplan

LeasePlan is the global market leader and largest player in the growing Car-as-a-Service market based on fleet size. Its Car-as-a-Service business offers fleet management services to Corporate, SME, Private, and Mobility provider customers and complete end-to-end service for a typical contract duration of three to four years. Services offered include purchasing, financing, fleet management, repair, maintenance, and tire management (RMT), insurance and damage handling, fuel, accident, and rental management. Leaseplan owns 1.4 million vehicles and manages a total of 1.9 million vehicles across more than 30 countries, allowing them to capture the associated full value chain of services along with the lifecycle.

Challenges Facing the Maintenance Management Services (RMT) Team

LeasePlan had designated workshops that were responsible for the maintenance and repair of client vehicles. These could be used for regular maintenance schedules, running repairs and servicing of standard accessories, tires (if opted by client), and battery replacements. Post damage inspection, workshops contacted the LeasePlan’s RMT team for request approval. The service Ops team gathered the essential information from the shop, utilized the existing information about the vehicle like client rules, vehicle history, last serviced details, etc, and made a decision whether the service request should be accepted, rejected, or sent for further review. This made the process time consuming and compelled agents to go through each rule type relevant to the request, thereby leading to higher cycle time and inefficiencies in the process.

A Comprehensive Cloud-based Data-driven Solution

This created the need for a solution that can provide data insights from historical data relevant to the agent and consolidate business rules in one place. The historical data can provide insights to agents and accelerate their decision-making process whereas utilizing inputs from the request and then passing them through policy/client rules can streamline the overall process. This will enable LeasePlan to edit/add/delete different types of policy rules at one commonplace and make the final decision. It will also reduce the overall time taken for decision making, streamline the overall approval process by bringing all the information in one place, and reduce multiple touch points within the LeasePlan teams.

Enhanced MIMS Repair Management Process flow

To achieve this goal of a hybrid solution using data approach and service policy rules, Quantiphi leveraged the AWS cloud platform. The solution offered had the following features:

Analytics-based data insights to:
- Develop a statistical model which uses historical data to provide insights
- Understand the role of every feature through statistical analysis for feature engineering
- Perform analytics on data to derive insights
Fully automated and secured platform to:
- Automate infrastructure provisioning. It leveraged services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda for triggering pipelines, and Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and AWS CloudTrail for monitoring and security
- Fetch details automatically for DB2 and Aurora, S3 location, and other parameters using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
Service policy rules automation to:
- Develop and implement business rules
- Store and fetch data for the service policy rules using Aurora Serverless to run the database in the cloud without managing any database instances
- Modify business rules on the fly with the help of maintenance applications with CRUD ability

Overall solution

Coupled with the best AWS cloud services, Quantiphi and LeasePlan were able to build a robust solution to process maintenance and repair requests for vehicles. The solution uses data from historical records, identifies patterns in data, and applies client service policies to faster process the requests. This has led to a significant reduction in cycle time from origination to closure. The solution automatically scales up during peak load of service requests thus enabling faster turnaround time of requests to help and serve driver-partners in a better way.