Illinois State University Car Sharing Initiative Reduces Costs

Sharing vehicles efficiently has enabled the Illinois State University (ISU) to reduce the total number of vehicles on campus by nearly 25% while increasing service to 89 university departments and student organizations, according to Agile Fleet, creator of the fleet management information system in place at ISU.

“Our challenge was to more efficiently share university vehicles and reduce the numbers of cars on campus. Five years ago, we had 346 vehicles on campus, and today we are down to 264,” said Aaron Matej, customer service administrator for ISU’s facilities management office. “We have also eliminated outside rentals; we did not use them at all in fiscal year 2018. By using our new fleet management system, we were able to analyze our fleet metrics and better utilize the vehicles we have.”

ISU launched its car sharing initiative in July 2018 using the fleet management information system. Since then, fleet operations has been able to:

• Offer efficient online vehicle reservations, eliminating manual scheduling processes
• Manage multiple motor pool sites from one location
• Consistently communicate cost-saving policies during the online reservation process
• Communicate easily with drivers regarding fleet changes
• Automate billing, reducing a process that once took hours down to a few minutes per month
• Collect mileage automatically via GPS and use the data for timely maintenance and fleet replacement planning
• Regularly survey customers for feedback via the system, achieving consistently high ratings.

“When we took on the challenge of reducing vehicles on campus, we wanted to see what we could achieve without sacrificing service to the people who need our vehicles. We think vehicles are essential to achieving the mission of the educational environment, and efficiently sharing has been the key to the success,” Matej said.

ISU has more than 21,000 students and 44 vehicles in its motor pool.