Employee driving doesn’t often get its own session at a procurement conference. But at ProcureCon East, it filled a room.
Motus hosted a panel of procurement leaders from Edgewell Personal Care, Sargento, Biogen, and Chiesi USA to talk about how their organizations handle employees who drive for work. Kristin DeCamp, regional vice president of account management at Motus, moderated.
Their programs couldn’t have been more different. Chiesi, a Motus customer, moved its US field team from company cars to personal vehicle reimbursement years ago. Sargento reimburses mileage through a simple form and keeps some company vehicles for local trips. Edgewell keeps company cars at headquarters for employees to sign out when they need one.
The panel surfaced a consistent pattern: employee driving often lands on procurement’s desk by default, while risk can sit in the gaps between departments. Here are six lessons from the conversation that apply whether you run company cars, reimburse mileage, or a mix of both.
Employee driving is a hot potato, so name an owner
Ask five companies who owns their employee driving program and you’ll get five answers. DeCamp called it the hot potato: HR wants it for onboarding and policy, Finance owns the budget, Operations manages the field team, and fleet teams sometimes keep it out of habit.
On this panel, it usually ended up with procurement. Flavia Ziarnik, director of sourcing at Sargento, said the company has no dedicated program admin, so finding the right provider fell to her team on top of everything else procurement now handles. Geoffrey Warren, senior manager of IT and BPO procurement at Edgewell, estimated about 80% of the company’s employees are remote. His team owns mileage reimbursement, and every trip to headquarters comes out of the procurement budget.
The lesson: Ownership by default isn’t ownership. Even if procurement holds the contract, name the stakeholders who should shape the program:
- Finance for budget, tax treatment, and audit readiness
- HR for policy, onboarding, and employee experience
- Operations or Sales leadership for field team needs and productivity
- Procurement for vendor selection, contract terms, and total cost
Bringing these groups in early also keeps the evaluation from collapsing into a price comparison.
Your riskiest vehicles might be the ones in the parking lot
Warren reflected on how easy it can be to access a vehicle through a standard sign-out process. The conversation raised a broader question: beyond making a vehicle available, how do organizations confirm that employees remain eligible to drive it? It’s an area where routine processes may not include ongoing checks.
While this is one story, it’s a very common blind spot for many organizations of all sizes. Companies with a formal reimbursement program for field teams often overlook the occasional drivers: company cars at headquarters, rentals on business trips, and remote employees driving to the office.
The lesson: Start with a complete picture of how employees drive for work, including fleet vehicles, rentals, and occasional business trips. These scenarios deserve attention alongside your field team’s fleet or reimbursement program
Point-in-time checks leave year-round gaps
Chiesi, a Motus customer, checks licenses and insurance when employees join the reimbursement program and again each year. That’s a stronger baseline than many companies have. It also points to a question every program faces: what changes between checks?
Ziarnik shared a story that made the point better than any statistic. After a speeding ticket, her license was suspended for two weeks. She stopped driving, but no one told her she needed to visit the DMV to reinstate it. She drove for about a year on an invalid license without knowing. She only found out when an insurer refused to quote her a personal policy.
As DeCamp put it, most people in that situation aren’t hiding anything. They just don’t know. And after an accident, one of the first questions is whether the driver was working, and for whom.
The lesson: Treat license and insurance status as something that changes, not something you confirm once. Year-round insurance monitoring and continuous Motor Vehicle Record (MVR) monitoring surface issues between annual checks. Motus data shows insurance monitoring identifies 80% more out-of-policy drivers than annual checks alone.
Know who carries the insurance before something happens
Two stories showed how insurance questions stay invisible until they’re expensive.
The first came from Mike Vigars, US regional head of global procurement at Chiesi USA, who talked about rental cars. For employees who rent infrequently, knowing whether to accept or decline the rental company’s coverage can take a refresher at the moment they book. This is part of a larger discussion on insurance and risk.
The second came from Flavia Ziarnik at Sargento. A hailstorm damaged a company van, and the team assumed insurance would cover the repair. The cost fell below the policy’s deductible, so the company paid for the repair out of pocket. The experience underscored how even a fully insured vehicle can leave you with a real bill.
Together, the stories raised a broader question for procurement: do you understand how insurance applies across every way employees drive for work? For personal vehicle programs, that includes setting coverage requirements and confirming employees keep meeting them, not just when they enroll.
The lesson: For every way your employees drive, know whose policy responds first, what the deductible is, and where employees find the rules when they need them. If the answer is “page 14 of the travel policy,” it isn’t working.
The hidden cost of company cars includes the people who run them
Vigars works for a company that runs company cars almost everywhere it operates. In France, everyone at Chiesi from entry-level sales reps to general managers drives a company electric vehicle. In the US, Chiesi moved its field team from company cars to personal vehicle reimbursement years ago.
When colleagues ask whether the US should go back to company cars, he points to his counterparts in similar-sized countries. Each has a procurement category manager whose full-time job is managing company cars. Bringing cars back would mean adding at least one more role, plus the vehicles, maintenance, and insurance that come with it.
The reimbursement data has also supported goals beyond cost. As a B Corp, Chiesi offers a higher reimbursement rate to employees who drive hybrid or electric vehicles. Because the program knows what each employee drives and how far, the company reviews the emissions impact of its field team every quarter.
The lesson: When you compare company cars to reimbursement, count the people and processes, not just the vehicles. Admin time, insurance claims, and vehicle management all belong in total cost.
Ask the field first, then make the compliant way the easy way
Before changing its reimbursement program, Chiesi surveyed its field team. What’s working? What would you change? Would you rather have a company car? Demand was higher than expected, the budget wasn’t built for it, and costs have climbed every month since.
He also offered the line of the session, paraphrased here: when people can choose between the easy way and the compliant way, they’ll pick the easy way. So procurement’s job isn’t to play compliance cop. It’s to make the compliant way the easy way, with governance built into the process.
Perception matters too. Warren said the most common pushback he hears about company apps on personal phones is the worry that the company can see where employees go. Being clear about what’s captured, when, and why goes a long way.
The lesson: Ask drivers what works before you change anything. Then build policy requirements, like license and insurance checks or safety training, into the steps employees already take to get reimbursed.
Questions to ask about your employee driving program
Use these to find the gaps before they find you:
- Who owns employee driving today, and which teams should have a say?
- What are all the ways employees drive for work, including company cars, rentals, and occasional trips?
- When did we last confirm each driver’s license and insurance status, and how would we know if it changed?
- Whose insurance responds first for each type of driving, and what’s the deductible?
- Can employees find our driving and rental policies at the moment they need them?
- When we compare program options, are admin time and insurance costs part of total cost?
- Have we asked our drivers what works before making changes?
Turning a hot potato into a program
Every panelist brought a different program to the conversation, and each one shared something other teams can learn from. That’s the real takeaway. Employee driving doesn’t have to be a perfect system on day one. It does need an owner, a clear view of where the risk sits, and a process employees will actually follow.
If employee driving has landed on your desk, Motus can help you see the full picture. More than 3,000 companies use Motus to bring reimbursement, risk mitigation, and analytics together, so they can reduce corporate risk exposure and get a clearer view of vehicle spend. Talk to a Motus expert about where your program stands today.
