Any fleet manager will tell you that efficiency is key to their practice. When your fleet is operational, the business makes money. When the fleet has broken vehicles, it can cost money by the minute. Here are some of the most common fleet management issues that are challenging businesses today and some of the solutions that can be employed to counteract them.
Excessive Time Spent On Administrative Tasks
A fleet manager spends a large portion of their time doing administrative tasks. With the help of technology, there’s a major advantage to be had with decreasing the amount of time spent doing these menial tasks. Things like tracking working hours, fleet service schedules, and so forth can be done with an asset tracking software program. This works to easily organize the data and automates future maintenance scheduling in the click of a button.
Fuel Prices
Running any sort of fleet opens you up to the vulnerability of fluctuating fuel prices. These prices have been on a steady climb for the last few years as crude oil prices have skyrocketed. While you don’t have a whole lot of control over the prices you pay at the pump, there are some other things you can do to combat high fuel prices for your fleet.
You should start by tracking your fuel consumption habits for all your vehicles. This way, you have a starting point that you can utilize to judge how specific actions reflect your fuel consumption. Next, utilize fleet optimization applications that can help you to identify more efficient routes to destinations that keep your fleet in a continuous motion. Also, try and identify areas where fuel consumption can be avoided.
Rising Fleet Maintenance Costs
Properly maintaining your fleet vehicles is the key to avoiding major breakdowns in the future. However, the rising costs of fleet vehicle maintenance can have you skipping regular maintenance. Instead of skipping over vital vehicle care, let’s look at some tips to help combat these rising maintenance costs for your fleet.
Start by automating your maintenance scheduling. One of the most costly mistakes fleet managers make is not have a viable schedule. Without knowing when a vehicle hits a mileage or hours threshold, you may end up doing maintenance well before the fleet vehicle needed it.
Or, you may end up waiting too long to do proper maintenance and end up with broken vehicles in need of costly repairs. Next, you can utilize vehicle tracking software that alerts you when components of the fleet vehicle are starting to malfunction. This way, you can get the vehicle in for maintenance before the component creates more of a problem that translates to an expensive repair bill.
Relaying Accurate Messages To Fleet Drivers
If you remember the telephone game from when you were a child, the message was always jumbled by the time it reached the end of the line of whisperers. You can curb this problem by simply employing a communication system with your fleet. Instead of wasting time each day trying to reach drivers via the phone, SMS, or email, you can utilize a communication system software that they can easily log in to. These systems also allow drivers to easily update their status for things like en route and ETAs.
Fleet management is a large task for any sort of operation. The above are many of the common issues that businesses are facing today in regards to their fleet management. Hopefully, you have discovered some solutions above that can help your fleet function more efficiently going into the future.