FORS reflects on transitional year and targets further progress in 2023

Reflecting on a year of progress and change, FORS, the Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme, has revealed there is much more to come in 2023.

January 2022 saw a fresh start for FORS. An experienced management team from Sopra Steria took over the concession and were quick to set out their mission to listen and learn from the FORS community. 2022 was earmarked as a year for transition and laying the foundations for future change and, with the year drawing to a close, FORS is proud of what has been achieved.

Future of Accreditation

This flagship project is helping to shape the future of accreditation and streamline processes. Many among the FORS community have already been involved in the project, providing ideas, testing concepts and helping to ensure the Standard is administered effectively. Whilst the project has several objectives, including building regulatory and enforcement agency confidence in the FORS Standard and auditing process, simplifying accreditation, and establishing clear accreditation routes for different sectors, at its heart is ensuring FORS continues to be a ‘business enabler’ for the community.

Some of the more immediate changes have included making the process of booking a Bronze audit more straightforward, increasing the capacity of every FORS Practitioner training course and making accessing Affinity Partner products and services easier.

Making FORS more customer centric

FORS’ customer success team has seen significant investment this year. As a result, the team has made more outbound calls and has intensified its focus on delivering first-class customer service. In addition, FORS has considered new ways of running the scheme day-to-day, as well as trialling innovative ways of digitising content and launching a new training suite.

The 2022 Annual FORS Conference also proved successful in engaging and informing operators, with 85 per cent of post-event survey respondents stating they are likely to attend future events, and 88 per cent saying their FORS knowledge had improved as a result of attendance. FORS also invested significant time and effort after the conference talking with those who wanted to raise issues and suggest improvements.

Commenting on the progress made in 2022, FORS Concession Director, Ian Henderson, said: “Since taking on the concession, our task has been to make FORS more accessible, more transparent and more customer centric. Therefore, we haven’t shied away from acting on the feedback of the FORS community when looking at how we transform the scheme.

“Our vision for 2023 is to keep progressing FORS towards being an even stronger ‘business enabler’ to accredited operators. This means we’re always putting the operators and specifiers first. We want to make things as easy as possible for our operators to drive safer, smarter and greener, and we want to be a trusted partner of their organisation. We want specifiers to be able to see the force of FORS in industry and recognise the value this brings.”

Operators can expect updates and continuing improvements to FORS Professional in the coming months, including a full technical and creative redesign of the FORS Practitioner programme. In 2023, Sopra Steria will continue to focus on growing the FORS community, looking at new ways of collaborating with the industry and FORS’ partners, and ensuring more tangible change.

Source: UK Haulier - FORS reflects on transitional year and targets further progress in 2023