CORPORATE • GOVERNMENT • PUBLIC SAFETY • UNIVERSITY • UTILITY
FLEETSolutions
MAGAZINE
Claude
Masters
NAFA’s
33rd
President
CAFM
VOL. 6, No. 2
MARCH/APRIL 2013
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Interview With NAFA’s New President:
Claude Masters,
CAFM
Claude Masters (right) receives his CAFM
from NAFA President Charles Gibbens.
By Gary Wien
Let’s start with the big question: Do
you have a main goal for NAFA to
pursue in the next two years?
Yes, and we’re already laying the
groundwork toward it. One of my main
objectives is to elevate NAFA’s name and
our presence on a national level. Without
going into too much detail about our
plans, what I’m trying to do is get NAFA
a seat at the big table in Washington, so
that when the government is looking at
policy that impacts the transportation
industry they call us at the same time
or maybe even before they call someone
like the American Trucking Association
(ATA).
I don’t know how obvious it is to a lot
of people, but when governments think
about putting in a new policy or legislation that impacts the transportation
agency, they call the ATA; but the ATA is
just one section of the industry. I’m actually on the Board of the Florida Trucking
Association, which is like a chapter of the
ATA. I think we need to increase NAFA’s
collaboration with the large government
agencies like the Department of Energy,
the ATA, and the regulatory bodies that
have a lot of impact on the way we run
our fleets. I want NAFA to increase the
level of cooperation and communication
that we have with these agencies so they
look to us as a good partner before they
start unilaterally making or setting policy
that will impact fleet managers.
Do you see NAFA’s role as a notfor-profit as something of an
underutilized aspect that can be
built upon to help us increase our
legislative power? I mean, NAFA
doesn’t have specific ties to certain
OEMs or push particular alternative
fuels or anything; the Association is
rather neutral on all issues.
Yea h, I t h i n k so. For exa mple,
T. Boone Pickens is out pushing fleets to
convert to natural gas, but, at the same
time, he’s also one of the largest natural
gas investors and has more holdings in
natural gas properties than anyone else
in the country. In other words, he has a
real vested interested in the success of
the natural gas industry. So, while some
people may think his heart is really in
the right place, he also has a pocketbook
interest as well. But, when NAFA pushes
our membership to get more involved in
alternative fuels or helps them green their
fleets, we’re not doing it from a pure business perspective. We’re trying to protect
our employers and have our employers
do the right thing, but there’s no single
commodity interest being pushed. NAFA
doesn’t tell members to convert to natural gas or electric or hybrid vehicles; we
simply say that there is a path available.
We try to teach our membership that
there is a solution for you and there is
a clear cut business case for alternative
fuels, but it depends upon what your
FLEETSolutions The Magazine for Fleet Management
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▼
CLAUDE MASTERS, CAFM, will become
NAFA’s 33rd President during the 2013
Institute & Expo in Atlantic City. He is
the Manager, Acquisition and Fuel, for
Florida Power & Light and has been an
active member of NAFA since 1996,
serving and chairing numerous committees over the years. FLEETSolutions
recently spoke with him about his plans
for the next two years as NAFA President.
Claude Masters
12
Sustainability is obviously very
important to you. Is this something
you started at Florida Power &
Light or with CenterPoint Energy in
Houston, your previous fleet?
We started working on sustainability at CenterPoint, but it was a bit of
an unusual situation there because we
bought the local gas company about five
years before I left. We actually merged
and migrated the natural gas fleet in
with the electric business fleet. So, at
that particular point in time, we had a
fairly substantial portion of the natural
gas company’s fleet running on natural
gas and I got my first real exposure
into heavy-duty alternative fuels. As an
electric utility, we were also covered in
EPAct legislation, so I had to become
intimately familiar with biodiesel and
www.nafa.org • [email protected] March/April 2013
EPAct compliance credits. We were able
to satisfy all of our compliance requirements through the use of biodiesel and
our natural gas vehicle purchases, but
before I left I also got introduced to
CALSTART and we started working on
the hybrid bucket truck.
George Survant, who was the Fleet
Director here at FP&L at the time, was
leading the group to develop and design
the first hybrid bucket truck. When he
recruited me to come to FP&L, he and I
began working on that project together.
Since we chaired the groups, everybody
sent their vehicle spec requirements to
me. I took all of the information and
consolidated it, and actually wrote the
specs that we used for the industry bid.
So, that was my introduction into the
hybrid arena.
Was sustainability something that
always interested you?
It was something that always interested me, even though I don’t really consider myself to be a “tree hugger” per se.
I’m not a hardcore environmentalist, but I
do know the difference between right and
wrong, and I know the difference between
what’s good for this country and what’s
not. It’s painfully obvious to me that we
weren’t making and we’re just starting to
make some strides. But the Energy Policy
Act was put in place in 1992. Here we
are in 2013 and we’re really not a whole
lot further along in our efforts to become
energy independent than we were in 1992.
I believe everybody has some culpability for where we are today. You can’t
point the finger and say it’s just the government’s fault or say it’s just industry’s
fault or that it’s because of fleet users
or end users; I think all of us have a
percentage of the culpability and are
responsible for us not being any further
along than we are. Just look at when the
government starting putting pretty serious
CAFÉ standards in place, saying that the
fuel economy numbers had to increase
dramatically. Everybody kept saying that
we wouldn’t be able to get to the levels
set. The same thing happened when the
EPA set the diesel emissions standards as
low as they did. I can remember back in
2003 when they were saying that the 2007
and 2010 emission standards could not be
reached, and there was the controversy
▼
WE HAVE TO EDUCATE
THE PEOPLE WHO
WILL BE THE DECISION
MAKERS AS TO HOW
IMPORTANT A CAFM
DESIGNATION REALLY
IS. TO ME, OUR GOAL
IS TO CONTINUE TO
STRIVE TO ELEVATE
ITS STATUS TO THE
POINT OF WHERE A CPA
DESIGNATION IS.
business environment is, what area of
the country you operate in, and where
your supply comes from. NAFA tries to
educate members so they can make good
business decisions on what offers the best
business solution for them.
Sustainability is just one subset of the
job. Fleet managers have got a lot of other
things that they have to say grace over,
but to be successful they have to really
know and understand the sustainability
segment of the business – and it is a growing segment of our business. In my 40 plus
years in fleet management, sustainability
has been a can that has been kicked down
the road for a long time. There are guys
who are four or five years away from
retirement who have made the decision
to let someone else with more time and
more of a vested interest worry about
sustainability rather than tackle the issue
head on. They prefer to do whatever they
have to do on a minimal, marginal level
and let someone else solve the problem.
I’ve seen that take place for a long time
and I think we’ve reached the point as
a country to where we’re not going to be
able to keep kicking the can down the
road. We have people waking up to the
fact that – not just from an environment
perspective, but from an energy independent perspective – it’s critical to our
country’s leadership to solve these issues.
We can’t just keep kicking the can down
the road and saying that the problem will
eventually go away… it’s not.
Claude Masters
about ultra low sulfur diesel. People didn’t
think they were going to be able to get the
sulfur levels down as low as they set, but
guess what? We got there.
Just this week, I put together an
executive presentation on proposals for
our passenger cars. The 2013 Ford Fusion
Hybrid is getting 41 miles per gallon. Just
five years ago, if somebody had said that
we can take a mid-size or full-size passenger car and have it get 41 miles per
gallon, they would have told you that you
were crazy, but that’s not the only vehicle
that reaches that level these days. Vehicles
like the Prius have been getting high fuel
economy numbers for a while now.
My point is that I think people are
starting to wake up to the fact that the
problem is serious and it’s not going away.
If we can do things to embrace the issue
and stop trying to fight things so much,
we can figure out a way to roll up our
sleeves, jump in there, and get it done.
I think we’re at the point where fleet is
beginning to make that transition – the
industry is beginning to believe that there
ONE THING I’D LIKE
TO SEE IS FOR
US TO ADD SOME
ANALYTICS TO THE
PROGRAM AND SOME
SIX SIGMA TOOLS
BECAUSE I THINK
THAT’S SOMETHING
THE INDUSTRY CAN
BENEFIT FROM.
®
Tell me about the composition of
your current fleet.
Depending upon the day, FP&L has
roughly between 3,400 and 3,600 vehicles.
It’s a little different from the fleet that I
came from because FP&L’s fleet tends to be
more medium- and heavy-duty equipment
than light equipment. We have roughly
1,800 to 1,900 vehicles in the medium- or
heavy-duty range. We don’t have nearly as
many cars and pickup trucks here. Some
of that is because it is a straight electric
utility and where I came from had lots
of pickup trucks for natural gas work
and passenger cars for field supervisors
and such. Here at FP&L, we use contract
employees for certain portions of work and
they provide their own vehicles, so that
helps keep the overall fleet count down.
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▼
are creative ways to make it happen. The
reality is that, as a nation and as a society,
whenever something really bad happens to
us, we figure out a way to get things done.
Claude Masters
You have experience with many
types of fleet vehicles. Do you think
a well-rounded background like
yours is an advantage for a NAFA
President?
I think what it does is provide a wheelbase for understanding different types of
fleet operations. I’m not saying that makes
me more qualified or better qualified than
the next guy, it just means I can relate to
many of the experiences of our members.
For example, some of our members operate fleets that are assisted by a fleet
management company and they don’t
have their own internal staff of mechanics and all that good stuff; that’s just a
segment of the business they’ve never
had to manage. We actually do both here.
We have internal shops and mechanics,
but we also outsource a portion of our
work. So, we have to deal with contract
administration and dealerships and repair
work done elsewhere.
We’re also in the process of taking
over the fleet of our parent company,
NextEra Energy (one of the world’s largest wind and solar companies). In April,
we’re going to begin managing a portion
of the NextEra fleet and over time we will
absorb the rest of the vehicles into our
fleet operations. This will involve bringing in a fleet administrator to manage it.
There will be a fleet management company responsible for the day-to-day work
and the fleet administrator will handle
the policy work and critical decisions such
as acquisition and disposal.
This will be, for lack of a better term,
a new venture for me because I’ve never
started a fleet operation from the ground
up, which is basically what we’re doing
right now.
It’s nice to be able to say you’ve
done it, I’d imagine. This means you
will have covered just about every
base in the industry, right?
Exactly.
How did you actually get into fleet in
the first place?
It’s a long story that I’ll try to make
short. When I was in high school, I was
in an Industrial Cooperative Training
(ICT) program. I went to school from
8 a.m. to noon and then went to work
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in an independent garage. This was in
San Antonio. My dad was an attorney
in Houston who had a friend that had
a very large law firm and was working
on a multi-million dollar lawsuit, which
was big back in those days. He asked my
father to come to San Antonio and help
him work on the lawsuit, so we moved
there for two years and that’s where I
did my junior and senior years.
I was working at a garage to learn to
be a mechanic. My father had a friend
who was an executive with the power
company that hired me after I graduated.
They had an apprentice training program
for their mechanics because working on
bucket trucks is a rather specialized field.
So about two weeks after graduating
high school, I went through the interview
process and began working for the power
company in Houston. I was working a 3
to 11 shift.
About a year after I started working
there, I noticed that most of the guys I
was working with were in their forties
and fifties. I remember seeing these older
gentlemen bent over as they worked on
vehicles all day long, and seeing how long
29/01/13 5:31 PM
WHEN NAFA PUSHES
OUR MEMBERSHIP TO
GET MORE INVOLVED
IN ALTERNATIVE FUELS
OR HELPS THEM GREEN
THEIR FLEETS, WE’RE
NOT DOING IT FROM
A PURE BUSINESS
PERSPECTIVE.
it took them to get upright and all that
stuff. I sort of decided that I didn’t think I
was going to be able to do all of that my
entire life, so I enrolled in the business
school at the University of Houston. I went
to college during the daytime between
7 a.m. until around 2 p.m, grabbed some
lunch, and then got to work by 3 p.m.
It took me five years to get a four-year
business degree; it was painful when I
was doing it, but now when I look back
at it, it doesn’t feel so bad.
You went on to continue your
education while in fleet and earn a
CAFM designation. What are your
thoughts on the CAFM program? Do
you have any ideas or plans for the
future of NAFA education?
I love the C A FM prog ram and I
love the curriculum. I was Chair of the
Certification Board for 2-3 years and was
on the Board for quite a while. I’m very
committed to that program. One thing I’d
like to see is for us to add some analytics to the program and some Six Sigma
tools because I think that’s something the
industry can benefit from. It also sort of
ties in with NAFA’s Beyond Fleet program,
which strives to elevate the status of fleet
managers.
Our industry is already very familiar
with Six Sigma because it’s used in manufacturing and the automotive industry
has been using it for years. In fact, it’s
what helped teach the Japanese about
quality control. What a lot of people don’t
realize is that the analytical tools that
they teach you about in the Six Sigma
program can actually be utilized in many
different ways within the day-to-day
business world. Six Sigma tools help you
understand important basic principles.
You don’t have to be a Jedi knight with
Excel or be a great statistician to be able
to utilize the concepts of what is taught
by the Six Sigma program. I think bringing that level of knowledge to the fleet
management community would be good.
What can NAFA do to continue to
attract fleet managers to the CAFM
program?
I think the bottom line is that they
have to see the value in it. We have to
prove to them that it does two main things
for you. First, it helps you get exposure
to ideas and concepts that you might not
otherwise be exposed to. Back when I
enrolled in the CAFM program, a number
of people who went through the program
at the same time had significantly different jobs than they do now. There were
government fleet managers that are now
corporate fleet managers and vice versa.
So, when I hear people say, “I don’t really
need to know this because I’m a government fleet manager” or “I don’t need to
know this because I’m a corporate fleet
manager,” I tell them that what you learn
in the CAFM program may be critically
important should you ever transition from
one segment of fleet to another as many
people do sometime in their career. I
think that one of the true values of the
CAFM program is in making you stretch
and learn things that you might not otherwise seek out on your own.
The second thing involves how NAFA
has been trying to elevate the name
recognition with the CAFM designation.
Today if you’re out on the street and you
say that you gave something to a CPA,
everybody knows what that means. If
you tell people that you’re a CAFM, the
majority of people outside of our industry
will say, “What’s that?” It happened to me
yesterday, in fact. I was doing a presentation to our executives and on the first
page of my presentation I had “Claude
Masters, CAFM” listed. One person asked,
“Just out of curiosity, what does CAFM
mean?” So I told him about the curriculum and how the program initially came
out of the Wharton School of Business and
NAFA brought it in house. By the end of
that, they were all sitting with their jaws
dropped saying, “We didn’t know about
that.” I said, “That was the purpose of
putting it up on that page, I was hoping
that someone would ask a question so I
could explain to them what it meant!”
We have to educate the people who
will be the decision makers as to how
important a CAFM designation really is.
To me, our goal is to continue to strive to
elevate its status to the point of where a
CPA designation is. Of course, not nearly
as many people have exposure to fleet
managers as CPAs and fleet management
is not as big of an industry as accounting, but, at the end of the day, we want
the big business decision makers to know
what it is and what it stands for.
To close, tell me a little about
yourself. Any hobbies? If someone
was to come up to you at a NAFA
chapter meeting or the I&E, what is
a topic that be a good conversation
starter with you?
I’m still kind of a gear head. I like fast
cars. Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of
time working on a new airboat I bought.
It has a high performance engine and a
383 stroker. It’s pushing 525 horsepower.
I also recently bought my son a used
airboat that I’ve been tinkering with,
trying to boost the horse power and its
performance. I like enjoy messing with
high performance engines.
I like how you enjoy being in the
garage, but wanted to make sure
you’d be able to walk at the end of
the day!
There you go! ■
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