Gaining fleet visibility is a crucial aspect of fleet management, so now might be the right time to evaluate your processes and procedures to identify any changes you can make. For example, if you are still using outdated systems and relying on paper to keep track of your fleet, you may want to look for ways to utilise technology. This article is designed to help you learn how to gain full insight into your fleet and get real-time updates so that you can prevent problems and inefficiencies. We will also take a closer look at a few key strategies that will allow you to gain better fleet insight and turn your fleet management company into a profitable business.
Track Your Vehicles
As a fleet manager, you may not always be aware of your vehicles’ current location on the map due to a variety of reasons. However, you may find that many customers want to get real-time updates on their rides and this can cause unnecessary problems for your company. Therefore, it’s important to track your vehicles and take advantage of fleet data. As a result, you can not only monitor productivity levels, but you can also improve other aspects of your fleet, such as maintenance. Technology is a powerful tool, which can help you track your vehicles and drivers by providing you with maximum visibility.
Use Tachograph Analysis Software
It’s important to ensure that your company complies with both local and European regulations. Using tachograph analysis can help you take control of your tachograph archive and minimise the risk of being penalised. This tacho analysis tool from FleetGO provides easy-to-use dashboards, reports, and alerts, which allow you to determine if your business meets the current tachograph regulations. FleetGO offers the best tachograph analysis software in the UK to manage and control your digital tachograph files. As a result, you can ensure legal compliance and find out if your company is at risk by getting access to clear driver infringement reports.
Schedule Regular Inspections
You should develop a proactive approach when it comes to maintenance management. Instead of waiting for problems to occur, you should remember to schedule routine inspections to monitor fleet health. This will enable you to detect any issues before they can get worse and take corrective actions. When an item fails, it’s crucial for fleet managers to react promptly by scheduling maintenance. Consequently, you can avoid vehicle breakdowns, extend asset lifespan, and improve safety, which means you are unlikely to incur penalty fines at roadside checkpoints. In case of an accident, a document proving that inspections have been done can help reduce your company’s liability.
Monitor Expenses
One of the biggest challenges you may encounter as a fleet manager is the expenses associated with keeping your fleet in perfect condition. You will need to monitor your fuel and maintenance expenses, if you want to reduce operational costs. Therefore, you should start by calculating the total cost of your fleet management, which will allow you to divide your costs into fixed expenses, such as taxes, permits, and licences and variable expenses like maintenance, fuel, and vehicle replacement. Monitoring your expenses will help you manage your fuel usage and improve your inventory.
Know When To Replace Assets
Fleet visibility can help you determine when to replace assets, that are no longer good to use. This ensures that you can maintain the highest level of quality through the timely replacement of parts. It might be beneficial to develop a vehicle replacement strategy so that you can reduce fleet costs. To determine the most effective replacement cycles, you will need to do a lot of research and consider whether a change can lead to savings in the long run. Take steps to identify which equipment is more and less efficient and what parts will be costly to repair.
Improve Fleet Safety
Accidents can be extremely expensive for your business, which can also damage your reputation. Therefore, it’s important to focus on reducing the risk of accidents and improving fleet safety. This can be done by ensuring that the concept of safety is a top priority for your organisation. Be sure to invite employees of all levels to discuss safety and offer new ideas to enhance safety policies. It can also be a good idea to incentivise safe driving habits or use gamification to provide employees with bonuses and rewards. In addition, everyone should have quick and easy access to the rules and regulations they need to follow.
Maximise Productivity
Productivity is another key priority that you will need to consider to ensure that your fleet is well-maintained. You will need to implement proper fleet maintenance, that can help you prevent sudden breakdowns, which can affect productivity. Also, you can make the most of automation by streamlining fleet processes and eliminating admin work. For example, you can automate notifications and updates about maintenance issues and generate and send reports. The data produced by your fleet can be used to maximise productivity and reduce downtime.
Select The Best Routes
Inefficient route scheduling is a challenge that many fleet owners face, so it is advisable to take your time to optimise your routes. This will make it easier for drivers to arrive at various destinations on time. Moreover, choosing the best routes will help you keep costs down and ensure your customers are satisfied at all times. Although this might look like an easy task at first glance, fleet route optimisation requires more than just finding the shortest route on the map. You will need to consider a variety of factors along the way, such as the number of vehicles on the road.
Ensure Clear Communication
There are many communication breakdowns that may occur as a result of poor leadership, technological issues, or language barriers. To ensure you can always get your message across and prevent miscommunication, it’s important to create a detailed communication plan, that outlines how, when, and where people will communicate with each other within the organisation. Roles should also be clearly defined so that your employees know who to contact in different situations. Moreover, you should pay attention to your team to identify any signs of bottlenecks or problems.
Provide Proper Driver Training
Driver training is an essential part of ensuring safety and success on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s important to understand the current risks associated with your drivers so that you can identify training needs. This way you can focus on specific issues that can be addressed as part of your driver training. For example, information like recent accidents or daily mileage can help you highlight potential training requirements and goals. At this stage, it will be easier to choose the right training approach to achieve the desired results. You can implement group sessions, e-learning solutions, or on-road fleet driver training.
Analyse Fleet Performance
Finally, analysing your fleet performance is the best way to determine whether your efforts have been successful. As a result, you can improve many aspects of your operations by using data effectively. There are different areas you will need to look at, such as procurement, maintenance, inventory, fuel, and safety. It might be useful to utilise fleet analysis reporting, which allows you to generate reports for various aspects of fleet management, such as vehicle age, fuel use, fleet costs per driver, and more.
