The Annual Review
What to look at once a year, in what order, and the questions that decide whether any of it is working.
Running it · Reference
Fleet decisions are annual by nature: budgets, replacements, contracts. The review that informs them is a day's work.
The cost picture
Whole-life cost per vehicle, updated.
Cost per mile and per operating hour by cohort, trended.
Unscheduled spend as a proportion, which is the number condition monitoring should move.
Days off road by cause.
Realised residual against forecast, which tells you whether the disposal end of the calculation is honest.
The fleet composition
Utilisation across the full year, not a quarter.
Redistribution candidates before disposal candidates.
Replacement candidates from the curve, not from the policy.
And the hire spend, which if rising is a signal about the owned fleet.
The data
The four quality checks, with their trend.
Device register against the fleet list.
Retention settings, checked against compliance obligations.
And the field lists, re-verified for any new vehicle models introduced during the year.
The operation
Alerts: fired, acted on, retired.
The fault code triage list, reviewed against the year's actual failures.
Service intervals against achieved, which is a compliance figure.
Daily check completion, watching for the zeroes.
The questions
Did unscheduled spend fall?
Did days off road fall?
Were the utilisation findings acted on, or noted?
Has the data quality held?
Has the deployment stayed asset-focused, or acquired driver features nobody decided on?
And would you deploy it the same way again?
What to do with it
One page to whoever funds the fleet.
With the three cost figures, the replacement list and one honest statement about what has not worked.
Because a review that reports only successes is read once, and the following year's request is harder.
Include what has not worked
One honest statement, every year.
A review reporting only successes is read once, and the following year's request is harder.
Naming the thing that did not deliver — the alerts nobody reads, the integration that was never built — buys credibility for the parts that did.
And it is usually the item that gets fixed, because it is finally written down.
Follow the difficult record
Use the scheduling reference to frame one representative case. The useful evidence is the record created when a value is corrected, approved and exported.