“We started because of the lack of innovation in the software world,” says Martin Evans, Jaama’s managing director.
The fleet software company is known for its singular Key2 product, which has picked up category wins in the BusinessCar Techie awards in the past and is different from most systems in that it doesn’t require the operator to upgrade – you just keep the same programme.
“We don’t really lose customers off the back end,” continues Evans. “We have one product – Key2.
There wasn’t a Key1, it’s Key2 fleet management and contract hire. All our customers are on the same platform, so they don’t get to that nasty junction in five years’ time where you need to upgrade. We’ve got a team of developers, so production never becomes obsolete.”
The one-size-fits-all approach has, in this instance, paid off, as Jaama has picked up a lot of business from fleets faced with expensive software upgrades from other providers.
“It could be that they’ve got two choices: to spend a significant amount of money with their incumbent supplier or they need to review the marketplace – and if they review the marketplace, they normally end up jumping ship.
“Also, when there’s pressure to deliver what the business wants with a finite amount of resource, software is the only solution to that problem, really.”
The firm is a few months shy of its 10th anniversary and is in the process of fleshing out its resources to take on more clients.
“We’re now looking to strengthen certain areas of the business to take us to the next stage of growth,” says Evans, “so we’ve bought in Bob Leighfield who was Arval’s old Midlands ops director to head up customer services. We’re just going through the stage of strengthening our account management team, in addition to our implementation services team as well. So there’s more growth to cope with the expected customers in the next year or so.”
In operational terms, Evans claims that duty of care is high on the agenda, with fleets wanting to buy into a software package.
“It’s not just a financial cost benefit because it’s the cost of exposure if somebody dies through having an incompliant vehicle. They’ve got to ask themselves: is what they’ve got in place currently enough so that it gives them the right policing levels to understand what’s going on in their business and report that?
“[The corporate manslaughter act] is on radars. It’s driving things like licence checking and understanding what’s behind the accidents – that kind of thing. One of our customers is in the process of doing one hell of a lot of work in this area because they’ve got a huge driver population, and we’re really tightening up the rules on giving them a holistic picture of their drivers.”
He adds that there’s an easy way of getting drivers into cleaner, lower-CO2 vehicles too: show them exactly what they’ll spend should they opt for a more polluting car.
“The way to drive down CO2 is to expose drivers to what it’s going to cost them in P11D. Before [current legislation], you used to fancy what you fancied as a car and you’d have that money taken out of your pay and people didn’t really equate it to cash. Whereas, things like our driver quotation engine now express the representative P11D value – and that’s the way to drive it down.
“When that driver fancies a 3.0-litre Alfa Romeo that’s 200 and something [g/km of] CO2, and he realises what that’s going to take out of his back pocket, it’s going to change. [The cost] is physically calculated for them. It just delivers the information to drivers.”
Back to school
In addition to its bread and butter software work, Jaama also operates fleet seminars to allow fleet operators to brush up on what they need to know. Marketing manager Ellie Whiten says they’ve been held since the company’s launch. “We started running them from day one when we started the business,” she says. “The software was being developed and we didn’t launch the business until about seven months after that.
“At the time they were duty of care seminars. From then, because of the change in the fleet market where it can be the responsibility of someone in finance or it can be somebody in HR that’s looking after the fleet, we changed the format of the seminars, so we now cover the vehicle, the journey and the driver. We just cover all bases of what’s best practice. People go away with policy documents, templates, they go away with a book about managing company vehicles. It’s not a software sell at all.”
The firm also helps the Institute of Car Fleet management with some of its courses and keeps its hand in with other organisations, such as ACFO and the Freight Transport Association, to stay up to speed with legislative changes.
Whiten adds: “We have one [seminar] here and we do them around the country. Originally the aim was for smaller businesses to come on these courses, but we find that there are a lot of larger businesses that come as well. There are a lot of new laws and compliance things that come out that people need an update on.”
