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24 May 2016

Why knowing your numbers is a game-changer

In the UK it is unlikely many people will know the name Billy Beane.

His on-screen persona, Brad Pitt, will be recognised, but it is almost certain that Billy Beane means almost nothing to most people.

Billy Beane is a genius. A change-maker. A risk-taker. Billy Beane is the name behind the Hollywood movie Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, and the bestselling book Moneyball:the art of winning.

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What Billy Beane did was utterly revolutionary in his field. As a coach of a major league baseball team (yep, baseball is pretty alien to most people, but stick with it) he transformed the player recruitment and selection process from anecdotes and subjectivity, to data and analytics.

Adopting an analytical approach

Faced with a depleted team, and competitors with much higher salary budgets, Billy Beane adopted an analytical approach to assessing players values and building a new team.

He devised new ways of gauging a player's performance and potential, and used hard data and analytics to build a team based around what the numbers said, not what the scouts thought. Sabermetric was the phrase coined to describe the model, and it was the sabermetric approach that turned Billy Beane’s baseball team on its head.

The team became completely devoted to the numbers. Every decision was made after reviewing the data – from which players to recruit, who to retain and when to release someone.

They challenged all their assumptions, looked at unique scenarios, ran what-if analysis and did not hesitate if the data dictated a change in direction.

It’s no different for company car fleet management.

Using analytics for all decisions  

Data analytics should be at the heart of every strategic and policy decision. Advances in data collation and analysis tools allow those with responsibility for fleet to model supply chain networks, run what-if scenrios and conduct contingency planning. They can also model strategic change, whereas spend analysis can identify consolidation and rationalisation opportunities. 

Companies that outsource their company car fleet face a number of challenges, some of which are quite unintended. Data capture is one such challenge. After outsourcing, the knowledge base becomes unbalanced. The supply chain hold all the data and typically only feed sanitised information to the company. Running data analytics and making decisions based on the data feed can become very challenging.

Work with your players (partners)

It is important, therefore, to work with the supply chain and get access to the correct numbers. Only then can the correct strategic decisions be made based on accurate analytics of the data.

And if you were wondering what happened to Billy Beanes team, well, after implementing sabermetrics, they went on to a record-tying winning streak of 19 consecutive games and into the play-offs (which is a good thing) and Billy Beanes’ model became regarded by many as the future of baseball. A definite game-changer.

This article forms part of a series based on the whitepaper: Unintended consequences of outsourcing company car fleets: and how to avoid them

This piece was provided by Fleetworx.

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