Fleet management is business management. Any downtime of a vehicle in your fleet means lost production and revenue for your company. And if there's one part of your business that could surprise you, it's fleet management. You have to be prepared for accidents, catastrophic engine problems, or having a vehicle declared unsafe during a commercial vehicle inspection.
On top of that, managing your vehicles is difficult when you have multiple people taking them into the field every day. The continuous use means you need to be on top of your maintenance schedule, checking and fixing any damage, your fuel costs, and compliance with the law.
Regardless if you have one or a hundred vehicles in your fleet, you have to provide a standard level of service for each one.
For example, each vehicle needs to be regularly maintained, the records need to be monitored on a regular basis, they have to be stocked with the proper materials and tools for your workers, and they need to be checked for damage and make sure they are at their top efficiency for fuel use.
This can be daunting, but there are steps you can take to improve your situation.
6 Steps To Improve Your Fleet Management
- Create a scalable and repetitive fleet management system. Apply it to all your vehicles and maintain stay on schedule with calendar based and event driven triggers. This means each vehicle will have certain tasks completed based on specific dates.
For example. you may need to take a vehicle in for registration and insurance purposes on specific dates of the year. Event-driven means you'll take the vehicle for maintenance or perform services on it based on triggers like having to change the oil at a certain mileage. However, you decide to monitor your fleet, it should be systematic. This prevents vehicle from 'slipping through the cracks.'
- Install and utilize GPS tracking on each vehicle. GPS tracking is a powerful tool and you should have a tracker in each vehicle. While it is costly to install it, it pays in dividends in specific ways. GPS allows you to know the specific location, travel, and conditions have your vehicle at any given time.
It also allows you to monitor the route of your driver and help them optimize their travel to avoid traffic jams or road hazards. This helps increase your driver's safety, speed up response time to service calls, improve the delivery of parts, and monitor fuel costs.
- Establish a fuel card service. The primary benefits of establishing a fuel card service is it helps understand and see where your fuel costs are at any given time in the month and what or who is causing the costs.
You'll be able to see which vehicles are using the most fuel and which drivers are purchasing the most fuel. It will give drivers continuous access to fuel, prevents fuel theft, and helps you manage your fuel expense. This is critical for many companies because fuel, if it goes unmanaged, can become a black hole of expenses.
- Create a communications policy and procedure for your employees. This policy would require your drivers to either check in with you at the end of the day, at specific times during the day, or to have always have a cell phone on them so that you can get a hold of them at any time. In today's day of cell phones, radios, and computers there is no reason you shouldn't have continuous communication with your drivers.
The policy would require drivers to immediately, within a specified period, report any problems with their vehicles or damage caused to the vehicles. For example, a driver noticed there was something wrong with her vehicle and intended to tell you at the end of the day. However, at the end of a long day, she forgot. If there is a policy in place to immediately report any problems with the vehicle, the employee will let you know as soon as she discovers the problem.
The key to success with this policy is teaching it to every employee and setting specific time frames for reporting problems. If employees know what is expected, the majority will comply.
- If you have a business in which you stock your vehicles with specific pieces of equipment, tools, or supplies, make sure all the vehicles are uniformly set up. This allows your employees to restock vehicles, check the efficiency and safety of equipment, and make replacements without having to search each vehicle for each of the items.
This allows you to know each employee left your business with what they needed for their day. Furthermore, with good tool and parts management, you'll also know what parts or tools need to be replaced.
- Consider outsourcing your fleet management. There are tremendous advantages you gain by outsourcing your fleet management. First, if you're doing your own Fleet Management you are probably spending quite a bit of time checking up on vehicles and making sure they're compliant with licensing, safety, and insurance laws.
Second, your time is eaten up by doing physical inspections of vehicles, getting them in for maintenance and inspections, maintaining physical records, and monitoring their locations. A professional fleet management system would take care of all of that for you. You would no longer have to worry or spend time on those tasks.
Furthermore, a fleet management system would give you regular reports, in a simple and easy to understand format. Peace of mind and more time, what more could you ask to make your day better?
Wilmar is the largest Fleet Management Company in the Southeast region of the United States. We manage fleets ranging from 1 to over a thousand vehicles.
Even if you're a small company, we can help you with our micro-fleet management services. Additionally, we offer fuel card services, license and title management, vehicle disposal, fleet leasing, and maintenance services.
If you would like to know more about our services, including the purchase of new vehicles for your Fleet, we encourage you to contact us and learn about our various fleet management solutions.