…Fleetcol collaborative vehicle procurement
The Association of London Transport Officers (ALTO) is a long-established network for local authority transport officers from the thirty-two London boroughs and the Corporation of London. One of its main aims is to stimulate closer collaboration between councils to achieve efficiencies and improve the way services are run. These services are broad ranging and including logistics, fleet, engineering, safety, legal, environmental, purchasing and more.
One of ALTO’s flagship initiatives is the London Commercial Fleet Project. This had its roots in a report, Acquisition and Management of Commercial Vehicles – a New Approach for London – which was published in May 2009 and identified that collaborative procurement of commercial and specialist vehicles could result in savings of around 10%.
The London Commercial Fleet Project was launched two months later in July 2009, and it chose to use Kahootz cloud collaboration software as a dynamic and essential platform for vehicle procurement.
The Fleetcol portal now allows any local authority in London to share and register their potential future requirements for commercial and specialist vehicles using a custom online database. They can also share details of suitable national or regional framework contracts together with their associated terms and conditions. This consolidated information allows ALTO members to aggregate buying requirements into lots and bring more power to public sector bulk buying.
By using cloud collaboration for the procurement process, Fleetcol can easily co-ordinate buying among many different stakeholders and, as predicted, delivers an additional discount of approximately 10% to buyers. In London alone, local authorities spend over £100m each year on acquiring and maintaining some 6,000 vehicles – so the savings gained by using the Fleetcol portal are potentially worth tens of millions of pounds.
“Through collaboration and co-operation, this innovative project harnesses our collective buying power to deliver significant cashable savings and improve the way we acquire and manage our fleet.”
– Will Tuckley, Chief Executive, London Borough of Bexley
Kahootz is ideal for driving almost any public sector collaborative procurement portal, and because it is simple to set up and very economical to use, can deliver major savings within a matter of weeks. To learn how other organisations are getting their procurement teams in Kahootz, download our free guide Collaborative Procurement and the Art of the Possible or try out the software yourself with a full-featured free trial.
