When it comes to fleet management, success is often found in the details. Small improvements in efficiency compounded over hundreds or thousands of different actions and interactions can make a significant difference on the bottom line.
The Case for Prioritizing Efficiency
Efficiency can be a bit of a buzzword in the business world these days. However, it’s still a very important concept – particularly for businesses that are looking to maximize spending and hope to continue producing positive ROI in spite of challenging marketplace conditions. But what, precisely, is efficiency within the context of business?
According to Indeed.com, “Business efficiency refers to how much a company or organization can produce as it relates to the amount of time, money and resources needed. In other words, a business’s efficiency measures how well it can transform things like materials, labor and capital into services and products that produce revenue.”
There are different types of business efficiency. One of the classic examples has to do with the amount of materials required to produce a certain product or provide a particular service. Take a car wash, for example. In this situation, efficiency could be measured as using the least amount of soap, water, and electricity possible to produce a clean vehicle that the customer is satisfied with.
Then there’s process efficiency. This is the overall efficiency of individual processes within the business – like managing a fleet (and all of the dozens of sub-processes that go with it). By improving efficiency in this area, you can enjoy a host of benefits, including lower maintenance costs, faster service/delivery, happier customers, and (ultimately) beefier profit margins for the larger business.
3 Tips for Enhancing Fleet Management Efficiency
As a fleet manager, you should always be on the lookout for ways to enhance fleet management efficiency. Here are several suggestions:
1. Use Fleet Maintenance Software
If you’re still approaching maintenance with a manual strategy, you’re missing out on opportunities to be as efficient as possible. Thankfully, there are ways to automate and transform repetitive, time-consuming tasks into streamlined processes that require less time and fewer resources. Fleet maintenance software is one option.
Fleet maintenance software is basically a centralized platform that brings all of your maintenance needs and data together in a single place so that you can increase productivity and lower costs as it relates to maintaining and operating each individual vehicle in your fleet.
Cetaris is probably the leading fleet maintenance software on the market. They offer businesses several unique benefits, including:
- Achieve lower operating costs by streamlining the cost of parts, labor, and fuel.
- Implement preventive maintenance scheduling to create predictable and proactive workflows.
- Automate data flow and integration across all enterprise software for real-time accuracy and dependability.
The benefits are clear. Rather than doing everything manually, fleet maintenance software gives you the ability to adapt a preventive maintenance approach that saves time today and reduces costs tomorrow.
2. Enhance Driver Training During Onboarding
Don’t underestimate the importance of driver training – particularly during the onboarding process. It’s easy to assume that, because someone already has experience working in a similar capacity for another company, they’ll be ready to go from the start.
However, every organization has unique processes (and you can’t blindly trust that they trained your new employee properly in the first place).
Thorough driver training during onboarding allows you to set clear rules and expectations, including those related to time and resource efficiency. This initial investment will offer long-term value and savings.
3. Improve Fleet Utilization
Few things drain a company’s resources quite like underutilized assets. And in the case of fleet management, underutilized assets can represent tens of thousands of dollars in costs.
If you want to improve efficiency, it starts by improving fleet utilization. The best way to do this is by using telematics data to understand metrics like distance traveled per vehicle, unauthorized after-hours utilization, drive time vs. on-site time vs. idle time, and route planning.
Liquidating just a couple of vehicles and reallocating resources to others could save your department thousands of dollars and re-energize your efforts.
Is Your Fleet Management as Efficient as it Can Be?
The thing about efficiency is that there’s always room for improvement. And while this can be frustrating, it’s actually a good thing. It keeps you pushing – always improving and growing. The challenge is figuring out where you can improve and then implementing proactive steps and solutions that help you get from where you are today to where you need to be.