An increased interest in digitalisation, spurred by the pandemic, is leading more fleets to investigate “joined-up” cross-platform strategies.

Debbie Fox, Commercial Director at epyx, explains that there is rapidly growing awareness of the synergies available from adopting complementary technologies to create new efficiencies.

“It’s been widely reported that the last year has seen much increased interest in digitalisation of fleet activities, as more people are working remotely and there is a greater demand for highly effective services that can be accessed online.

“What probably hasn’t been discussed as much has been something that we are definitely hearing in our conversations with new and existing customers, that there is an increasing awareness of what can be achieved through thinking about digitalisation in a joined-up, cross-platform sense, rather than it running in parallel lanes.

“For a long time, technological solutions were often siloed in the minds of fleets. They wanted something that made a process better or solved a problem. Perhaps if they were thinking bigger, they wanted to make improvements in an entire area of activity. While that situation has probably been changing for some time, the pandemic has added momentum.”

Debbie said that epyx offers platforms that manage service, maintenance and repair (SMR), vehicle procurement, short term rental, and vehicle remarketing, so was very well-placed to observe this development.

“The vast majority of our customers use our SMR platform, 1link Service Network, which is operated by fleets with around four million vehicles. Those that have also adopted our 1link Disposal Network remarketing platform, for example, are able to use the service record as part of the vehicle description when the vehicle is remarketed.

“Similarly, those that use 1link Service Network alongside the 1link Hire Network daily rental platform are able to much more easily co-ordinate when vehicles will be off-road because of SMR actions and provide replacements from daily rental providers.

“These are fairly basic examples and there are many kinds of cross-platform efficiencies of this kind available through digitalisation. We expect this to develop into the beginnings of a major trend during 2021.”

Debbie added that individual modules of 1link Disposal Network are available in order to allow customers to more easily access the specific benefits of a joined-up approach.

“This is all about ensuring our customers are able to access exactly the kind of digitalisation they require. For example, fleets looking to manage their logistics or drive efficiencies within their recharge process can take specific modules for those purposes”

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