Fleet assets represent one of the most significant capital and operational expenditures for local governments. They are fundamental to the delivery of essential services such as waste collection, road maintenance, parks management, and community transport. Yet, despite the strategic importance of fleet operations, many councils lack the system infrastructure necessary to support good governance, real-time oversight, and continuous business improvement.
Integrated Fleet Systems
Achieving this level of maturity requires councils to invest in system integration—bringing together fleet, finance, fuel, maintenance, HR, and asset data into a cohesive framework. For many councils, however, this remains a distant goal due to competing priorities, limited ICT budgets, and legacy systems that are not fit-for-purpose.
Nonetheless, the costs of inaction are significant. Councils that delay systems development will continue to rely on reactive decision-making, fragmented data, and manual processes that drain capacity from frontline and support teams. They also risk breaching regulatory requirements, missing financial savings, and falling behind in their transition to NetZero Fleet.
The Governance Gap
Councils require system capability to enable executives and operational leaders to exercise appropriate oversight of fleet performance. This includes visibility of asset utilisation, maintenance compliance, fuel consumption, emissions output, and total cost of ownership. In the absence of integrated systems, this visibility is impaired, limiting a council’s ability
The governance gap is further compounded by fragmented data sources and a reliance on manual reporting processes, which are resource-intensive and prone to error. Consequently, executive reporting is often backward-looking, rather than enabling proactive or strategic intervention.
Context
Councils have Finance Systems, Asset Management Systems and some have dedicated Fleet Management and Maintenance Systems. These achieve some of the things the Fleet Team actually needs to effectively deliver their service. These systems may be:
- supported by digitised processes, like prestarts and maintenance, enabling real-time data; and
- integrated across the organisation, linking fleet with corporate data, enabling data flow and generation of KPI reporting.
With organisational systems that do not meet their needs, most Fleet Managers resort to maintaining parallel, manually updated spreadsheets as they try and make sense of what is going on with their fleet. This workaround is typically borne of necessity rather than choice, as these managers seek to establish visibility over asset utilisation, maintenance scheduling, cost management, and compliance. This creates a neverending cycle of updating data and reconciliation between fleet spreadsheets and corporate systems, which invariably includes a time lag. Spreadsheets are not live, and they do not enable real-time data flow, creating frustration among the Fleet Team and across the organisation.
These system conditions impede fleet data aggregation and analysis, delay corrective decision-making and the benefit of potential business improvement and financial savings.
Recommendations
Council fleet development and fleet performance is dependent on improvements to its systems that will enable better business processes, compliance, data access and informed and timely decision making. Councils need to invest in development of their organisational systems:
- digitisation of fleet processes, including Workshop job cards and pre-starts to enable real-time fleet data flow;
- integration of fleet systems to enable fleet data flow across organisational systems to avoid duplication of data entry; and
- aggregation of fleet data to enable regular reporting of fleet performance indicators and tracking of fleet trends.
By embedding fleet governance into broader corporate systems and decision-making frameworks, councils can enhance operational accountability, improve community service delivery, and contribute meaningfully to broader sustainability and financial stewardship goals.
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