FleetDrive 22 - April 2020 | Page 10

Meryl Connolly | National Fleet Operations Manager | CSIRO My staff and I have always worked from home once a week, but once this COVID-19 happened we moved towards that model permanently a few weeks ago. We have staff working in Queensland, Hobart, and I’m in Sydney but it’s working for us so far. This is already affecting us due to the fact we have 56 different sites that are completing many different degrees of work. We're already looking at how we're going to keep getting vehicles registered, and then how we can get them inspected during this shutdown. We've got a full senior team working on figuring it all out, so from my point of view, I'm watching closely what they're doing so I can work out how we are going to act. We have stopped all non-essential use of our vehicles and stopped all research vehicles unless it is critical to their research and have seen a much lower amount of vehicle use. I am doing a GPS project at the moment but that has already been affected because we're not getting the volume of data from the vehicles that we normally would. For future vehicles it is going to become tricky if the dealerships can’t deliver vehicles due to whatever is happening within their own businesses or if we've got a site shut down and physically can't have it delivered. We are all going to have to be very careful and plan for these impacts. We are currently doing a lot of things to keep people safe within the cars. We have been educating our staff on how to decontaminate the cars after use, advising them on how many people are allowed to be in the car, what to do if there's not enough pool vehicles, and how they get around that. Things are just taking longer, but we must be ready for that slow down. Every industry is going to be struggling so we have talked a lot about that as a team. We have got to all work together and be respectful of what everybody's challenges are. 10 ISSUE 22 2020 / WWW.AFMA.ORG.AU Philip Browne | Managing Director | Autorola Australia From a health perspective all the things the government are doing are looking like they are having an effect and that is something important we need to all work together on. It will take time however and it is having some effect on our operations in the meantime. Our general sales trend is down, but things are still motoring along for now. Because of our reliance on rental companies we have been hit very hard, but our corporate fleet customers are continuing to turn over for us so that’s encouraging. We predict our April result will be about 50 per cent of March and May will be a bit lower than that again. We are still selling cars because there are some buyers out there, but we are working extremely hard to find new avenues of trade because some of the traditional buyers have stopped buying. We are finding accident numbers are down dramatically since COVID-19 hence there are less write offs overall and that has had an impact. We have noticed lower value cars are still selling quite well to the independent dealers, but the large franchise dealers have slowed their purchasing on late model, low kilometre vehicles. So, there’s challenges there. In terms of our workflow we have not reduced staff and we have no intention to during this pandemic. Currently our staff are still busy, it is just that their tasks and priorities have changed and we are adjusting accordingly.