Public sector fleets increasingly moving towards e-commerce

Public sector fleets are increasingly moving towards e-commerce links with major suppliers, according to fleet software market leader cfc solutions.The company says that the trend is part of a wider move towards using e-commerce to minimise costs and improve service in the public sector, and has been seen in more and more public sector fleet software tenders during the last 12 months.Business leader Andy Leech said: "This is a development that appears to be gaining pace quite quickly. A couple of years ago, most public sector fleets lagged behind their private sector counterparts in the use of e-commerce. Now, some have caught up and even overtaken them, and there are many who are not far behind.“This development is clearly part of general thinking in the public sector to use e-commerce to deliver better services at lower cost – but it is also being prompted by the continued emergence of better e-commerce facilities for fleets.”Leech said that the most advanced public sector fleet software installations now had more than a dozen e-commerce links with suppliers, ranging from service and maintenance to insurers. This meant that accurate, timely information could be easily drawn into a central fleet management software system where it could be analysed.He added that the trend was being enabled by the use of Extensible Markup Language or XML, an open standard for exchanging structured documents and data over the Internet that made adoption of e-commerce much easier.Leech explained: “In fleet software, as in many other areas across IT, the use of XML has made the adoption of e-commerce much more practical and effective. It means that we can structure our fleet software to take data from a supplier over the Internet with ease, allowing our systems to ‘talk’ to others without the need for special interfaces.”http://www.cfcsolutions.co.uk/

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