'We’re seeing that there’s a pretty strong trend in all of indirect purchasing and as a result in the fleet area for companies to centralise purchasing', said Peter Soliman (Inset), Fleet Logistics chief executive officer. 'The trend has shifted from centralisation across Europe to some companies establishing global purchasing teams. That’s a good thing in that you get more scale effects and more professionalism, but to make it work, you need more transparency,' he continued.

Mr Soliman says that leasing companies have tried to collate the data, but this means gathering data on competitors and other leasing companies are not prepared to share sensitive information. This makes fleet management companies ideally suited to gathering the data, reckons Mr Soliman. 

Fleet Logistics launched its web-based global reporting platform, Fleet.Global last year. mr Soliman concluded: 'From a pure business case standpoint, you enable a customer to pull together the volumes that they’re buying from a manufacturer around the world and saying, ”Here is the number of cars I am buying from you worldwide and please extend your rebates based on those volumes. That alone justifies the product'. 

He also pointed out that the same process can be applied to other commodities such as tyres and fleet insurance.