Project example: Fleet and cost management in South Africa

After a year of consultancy work with ZLU, during the break of a final presentation I was asked “in passing” if I could imagine going to South Africa for a few months. Naturally I could, and by the Sunday of that same week I had already received my vaccinations and gone through the usual preparation procedures and was sitting on a plane to Johannesburg. In the end I actually spent a total of two years in South Africa – the first year in Pretoria with a fleet management-service provider, and the second year with a car manufacturer in East London.

When I arrived in Pretoria, I immediately started work with an international team consisting of South Africans, Brazilians, and Germans. The objective of our consultancy work was to develop and implement a supply chain management structure for the “Replacement Process” for a vehicle fleet. With the support of ZLU, the fleet management service company had submitted a successful tender to a South African telecommunications company and was now in the situation of having to control a fleet of some 20,000 vehicles. Over a period of about three months a strategy was developed in which the processes and structures of the entire supply chain were modelled and a fleet replacement algorithm was developed. With the support of ZLU, two distribution centres were established in the north and south of the country, and these were supplied with the new vehicles from the manufacturer. Additional fittings were then installed and then the vehicles were delivered to the branches of the telecommunications company. The search for the locations was an adventure in its own right; and security aspects played an important role in the considerations.