If you are thinking about trying to improve your fleet business, there are a lot of things to think about and areas to focus on. One of the main things you’ll want to consider is how you can ensure you are going to manage the fleet effectively, and this is the kind of thing that is always going to be really important to bear in mind. As it happens, good fleet management is easy enough to succeed with as long as you put your mind to it, but you will need to be aware of a few key things in the first place.
In this post, we’ll discuss what some of those might be. The following are all useful tips for managing a fleet that you may want to bear in mind. You’ll find that even just applying a few of these could be incredibly useful and really make a radical difference to your business on the whole.
Focus On Preventative Maintenance
Clearly, your vehicles are a hugely important part of your fleet business, and you’ll always need to make sure that you are looking after them as effectively as you can. One of the main ways to do that is to ensure that you are focusing on some strong preventative maintenance, which is where you are maintaining the fleet rather than reactively responding to things going wrong with it. If you can take this approach, you are going to find that it’s a much better way of handling things, and that is therefore really important for you to consider. If you can focus on preventative maintenance, you are going to keep your fleet in a much better state at all times, so it’s a really useful thing to bear in mind.
Essentially this comes down to making sure that you have scheduled your maintenance out. Each vehicle will have a recommended service schedule, and it’s really worth sticking to that if you want your vehicles to be kept well. Beyond that, ensure that you are sticking to a decent schedule for oil changes, tire rotations, brake check and inspections. This is going to help avoid a lot of costly breakdowns and keep your vehicles much more roadworthy for longer.
Use Fleet Management Software
Very few businesses with fleets these days would try to do anything without the use of fleet management software, and this is something that you are definitely going to want to think about. If you have the right software in place, it should mean that you are going to have a much easier time controlling everything in your fleet. Manual tracking simply isn’t going to cut it at scale, so you should make sure that you are using a good fleet management system at all times.
Using this kind of software for fleets ensures that you are able to monitor everything from fuel usage to maintenance schedules and even the behavior of your drivers, as well as much more. It’s also essential for tracking vehicles with GPS in real time, and for improving route optimization as well. The right software really ends up paying for itself thanks to the improvements in time and efficiency that it will bring, so this is something you’ll want to bear in mind for sure.
Monitor Fuel Consumption
It probably goes without saying that fuel is one of the major costs that you are going to need to think about in a fleet business, and you should therefore make sure that you are doing all you can to keep on top of it. You’ll have to make sure that you are aware of exactly how much you are spending on fuel, as well as having a sense of what you might be able to do to reduce that cost across time. Track your mileage and identify patterns in excessive fuel use – this could point to an issue that needs fixing, whether it’s fraud or simply just inefficiency driving habits, which can then be fixed or worked with at least.
If you are paying close attention to your fuel consumption, you are going to find it a much simpler thing to keep your costs down, so it’s hugely important to make sure you are thinking about this from the outset.
Hire & Train Good Drivers
Your drivers do represent your brand, and you’ll want to make sure that you are happy with who you have out on the roads. They are also your biggest liability, hence why you need to make sure you are hiring very carefully. You should be really happy with who you hire to drive for you, and you should also make sure that you are training them up as well as you can and regularly too. If you can do that, it’s going to mean that you are much more likely to be able to improve safety across the board, as well as improving fuel efficiency and customer service. All of that is going to really help a lot, and you will be glad to have done so.
Track Your Data
So many fleet companies out there are not really making use of data in any real sense. But you’ll find that data is a hugely vital part of running your fleet, and of making sure that you are going to be able to run your business effectively. There is data everywhere that you can make use of, from mileage and idle time to service history and more. It’s vital that you are tracking all this stuff and analyzing it effectively if you want to draw out any inefficiencies and reduce your costs. That is going to be a much more effective way to approach things on the whole.
Those are just some of the main things that you should think about when it comes to managing your fleet effectively. Make sure that you don’t overlook these vital parts of the process.
