Fleet Management Case Study: Eqstra General Motors

4.1. Background

Eqstra Fleet Management (EFM) was established in 1984, by Hertz Car Rental and the business has been in operation for 31 years; known first as PCL then IFS and finally EFM post 2008.

Prior to its listing on the JSE on May 12, 2008, the EG was the “Leasing and Capital Equipment Division” of Imperial Holdings, a large South African-based conglomerate. The immediate short term impact on the cost of funds given the EG’s move from the Imperial group’s treasury to predominantly bank funding, was significant and especially impacted EFM, as a business operating in the competitive SA OPR market. The 2008 global financial crisis further compounded the situation, leading to capital constraints for the newly listed EG and was a contributing

EFM has a strategic objective to expand all fleet services to ROA in the short to medium term. The strategy is in response to the current capital constraints being experienced by the EG as a result of both the capital markets and poor performance of a group as a whole. However a traditional lack of alignment between strategy and performance management combined with slow historic strategy implementation, as highlighted in EFM’s SWOT analysis in Figure 4 below, are barriers to achieving this CSF in ensuring EFM’s long term

The IFMS project suffered from not only unrealistic expectations and inadequate project scoping and definition but this was also compounded by ineffectual project management by all parties and even against poor ERP implementation statistics highlighted, the relative performance of the IFMS implementation project has been extremely poor, having taken over 200% longer than expected and with a final total implementation cost of $13, 5 exceeding budget by