Your fleet management practices have a significant role to play in your business' value chain. With a well-managed fleet, you can attend to customers within the shortest time possible as well as reduce the cost of owning the fleet.
In turn, your business can build a reputation of being reliable enough. While it might seem like hiring a fleet manager is an added business cost, the value that working with one can provide can never be compared to the cost you would have saved.
In a nutshell, they will help to streamline your business' roles in the field, yielding better results and more profits.
Here is how a fleet manager can transform your business:
Acquisition of Vehicles
Your value chain will be as good as your vehicles. Choose an amazing vehicle, and you will get to clients faster as well as serve more clients. Ideally, a fleet manager will help you make the right vehicle choices.
Want vehicles with great fuel economy? You can always rely on a reputable manager to pick the right one. They can also help in gauging whether you should buy or lease your vehicles. At the end of the vehicle's operating life, the fleet manager can also help you remarket it.
Maintenance
Keeping up with maintenance schedules can be tough when you have other business roles to deal with. Sadly, ignoring fleet maintenance can be a recipe for disaster, from failed orders due to vehicle failure to road accidents. While a maintenance issue might seem trivial, ignoring it is a sure way to let it grow into a bigger problem.
A fleet manager will take this burden from off your shoulders. They can take care of every preventative maintenance need to ensure your vehicles perform in peak conditions. As long as you pick the right manager, you can also rely on them to negotiate maintenance prices and schedule with the different service centers.
Record Keeping
It can be pretty easy for the different records that come with owning business vehicles to get forgotten. However, ignorance is never an excuse for not having up to date records such as driving licenses. In fact, missing most of these documents could lead to huge business losses in terms of fines.
Hiring a manager can help you keep all these records in check. They can also ensure that you are compliant with the different state laws and have the necessary documents to show.
Ideally, you need to meet requirements from the International Fuel Tax Agreement, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Driver Behavior Monitoring
Poor driver behavior can be detrimental to your fleet's health as well as your reputation as a business. Even worse, there is a risk that a driver might escape with your vehicle while on the job. With a fleet manager, controlling these aspects of the business will be pretty easy.
Nowadays, telematics has made it easy to track vehicles from the comfort of a screen. As for accidents, these devices can make it easy to identify maintenance issues as well as our drivers' behavior while on the road. In case a driver takes hard turns, over-speeds or drives erratically, you can easily know.
Working with a fleet manager who understands how to use these devices can help you control your drivers. They can easily retrain your fleet drivers to prune any bad driving behavior.
Cost Control
A lot of factors matter when calculating the cost of running your fleet. If you do not have enough control over these factors, the chances are that you will end up spending more.
Some of these factors include the cost of fuel, the type of vehicle you use, whether you lease or buying, the route your vehicles choose and the maintenance schedule you follow. A fleet manager understands the math behind all these factors and can help you make budget-friendly choices.
Working with people who specialize in fleet management can offer you insights that you wouldn't have known while managing your fleet alone. The long-run benefit of hiring a fleet manager is having happy clients as well as saving the cost of running your fleet.
Contact Wilmar today to leave your fleet in the hands of professional fleet managers.
