How to optimise lifecycle costs for your fleet

Providing quality dedicated transport for your residents at your homes comes at a cost, and our job is to ensure that we optimise the return on investment for you. Optimising the total cost of ownership and operation for you is our area of expertise, and

falls into five categories of our focus.

Buy it right

We’ll always start with cost-effective initial supply, and generally recommend a high quality and low mileage pre-owned vehicle that will still look very smart sat outside your care home and be a pleasure for your residents to ride in and your staff to drive. We can always

provide you with brand new vehicles if preferred, but we can reduce you monthly cost over time with a fully prepared minibus that looks as good as new but doesn’t come with the depreciation hit to your books.

Controlling the costs

Managing the service and other maintenance costs is something that we are very focused on. We have often seen garages take advantage of care operators, as they know that the vehicle has to be serviced or maintained to be kept available, and apply higher charges or state that additional work is required where it may not be. They can’t get away with this with us. So on your behalf, part of our job is to ensure that no-one takes advantage of you.

Measure, manage, maximise

A part of our service is to monitor your fleet usage, and to rotate vehicles around your portfolio, to ensure that each home has a minibus that meets their needs and that they will use, and that vehicles are perhaps switched between locations to even out mileages. That can protect future resale value, where some homes usage is much higher than others, and conversely some are much lower.

Renew to re-use

We can provide refurbishment services for your existing vehicles to refresh their look and appeal to extend their usable lifespan in your service. This covers both external bodywork as well as interior fitments. This can often be a very cost-effective method of sweating your

asset, especially if a vehicle has not covered much mileage.

Keeping the value in

By rotating vehicles to even out mileages, ensuring that servicing, maintenance and testing are all always up to date, we can optimise the resale value of your assets when it is time to refresh your vehicles to newer and improved models for your residents to enjoy. Effective

disposal at end-of-life with you helps generate a cash return that can be invested back into your new acquisitions. All of these processes and attention ensures that FMS reduces the lifetime cost of ownership and operation of your fleet for you, so that providing such a great facility for your residents to enjoy trips out is both cost-effective as well as reliable.