How FleetWave helps drive the fleet strategy for Wake County

We interviewed Thomas Kuryla, Director of Fleet Operations at Wake County Government who have  been using FleetWave since 2017 to manage over 1000 vehicles and assets.

Could you explain a bit about what your company does?

“So I’m with Wake County Government in Raleigh, North Carolina. So we provide fleet services, vehicle acquisition, maintenance, repair, fuel for our departments, which includes Sheriff EMS, administrate and service vehicles.”

How does your fleet of vehicles enable your success?

“Our importance of our vehicles is to keep them on the road, safe, reliable and available. So it’s all about decreasing downtime, keeping the vehicles on the road consistently on a day to day basis.”

What is your fleet size?

“Our current fleet is about 1,200 vehicles, about 65% is emergency response.”

What type of vehicles and assets make up your fleet?

“Probably over half of our fleet is sheriff. Our EMS department has about 80 ambulances, which takes a lot of effort to keep them on the road. And besides that, we’ve got just regular cars, service trucks and vans.”

What are some of the challenges of running a fleet in the government industry?

“So currently the challenges are finding vehicles. Right now it’s constantly looking for vehicles that will replace the vehicles that are due for replacement. The manufacturers are giving us a lot of challenges based on pricing and availability. So we will issue purchase orders to buy vehicles and they will cancel our PO’s after like nine months waiting for the vehicles and then we’ve got to find a replacement.”

How has FleetWave helped you overcome the challenges you were experiencing?

“FleetWave we use on a daily basis and everything needs to come out of FleetWave for the direction that we move in. So whether it’s miles per gallon, utilization, carbon footprint, replacement analysis, we’re using it for any decision that’s made for replacing vehicles in the direction that we’re moving in the future.’

What features do you use most in FleetWave?

“Analyzing odometer usage and cost of vehicle ownership, those are key features to decide when to replace a vehicle, what to replace it with, and when to replace it.”

What is the primary benefit that you have received from FleetWave?

“Data management, and data drives our decisions, so we don’t have good data, then we can’t make decisions.

So everything is about bringing data into our system. So we do a lot of integrations with other software’s and so we try to make it a one stop shop with FleetWave, where we can go in there and see anything from our fuel, to our telematics, to our warranty reimbursement, to our repair orders. So we’ve got one place to go for all of our answers.”