Fleet management process at Equans
 

Challenges

Because of the on-site work on industrial installations, ENGIE Fabricom needs to maintain a fleet of utility vehicles and trucks, all of which have been adapted to fit the need of the on-site team on an almost individual basis. To this end, ENGIE Fabricom partners with several vehicle manufacturers and vehicle conversion companies.

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The existing bespoke fleet management solution was purely a system of record, and did not provide interactive features towards vehicle owners, nor did it extensively integrate with other systems or orchestrate the process in any way.

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The back-office performed the other tasks as a fully manual process with PDF catalogs, spreadsheets, request forms and emails.

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The solution

However good at its core features, it did not make sense to extend the system of record with the new required functionality. Task orchestration, integration and interactivity were clearly the

strong points of a BPMS which led to the design of a fleet management process using the Bizagi BPM Engine, which was already in place for other processes that required orchestration and approvals.

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The fleet management process we designed using Bizagi, was capable of being triggered in a manual fashion by the team or an automated way by the system of record. It would handle the request or replacement flow for a utility vehicle end-to-end.

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This included:

• any required preparation by the back-office;

• the configuration of the vehicle by its future owner (incl. the required modifications to be performed by the conversion partner and on-the-fly calculation of the resulting vehicle price);

• the calculation of additional services such as tire maintenance, insurances and management fees;

• handling how different cost elements are by default expressed in a certain unit of time or per vehicle and should be expressed over the entire lifetime of the vehicle (e.g. insurance per year, conversion option per vehicle…)

• approval of the request by the line manager;

• post-configuration tasks to be performed by the back-office such as ERP updates and selection of partners and generation of provisional order forms per partner;

• provisioning of the related investment request, also implemented on Bizagi;

• being available in the language of any end-user (NL/FR)

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Our team of analyst-developers carefully observed the as is process end-to-end including all existing forms and information repositories, actors and constraints, opportunities and potential pitfalls, in close cooperation with the head of purchasing. Together they created the data model and decision policies, which were required as a baseline when creating the process flow and associated forms in Bizagi.

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Our team of analyst-developers and the fleet management team iterated on potential versions of the new process using the easy-to-understand BPM model. Careful consideration was given to a master data model that would be able to produce all required combinations of vehicles, feature packages and detailing, as some were compulsory, mutually inclusive or mutually exclusive. Predicted mileage and fuel type further influenced the cost of certain options and the vehicle’s residual value.

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This led to a dynamic configurator for the vehicle owner with immediate feedback on the price change and integrated guidance on the many options without the back-office having to be involved. The same was true for the approval process. Only vehicles that were ready for an investment case reached the back office.

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The results

The solution was designed to alleviate the stress of missing out on a required replacement, to shield the back office team from unnecessary involvement and to remove all manual calculations. The savings would be estimated at one full FTE back office alone (which is yearly recurring) at a one-off cost of 0.7 FTE (excl. platform licensing).