Efficiently managing a fleet depends on your operations. However, most managers face endless, tedious, and inefficient tasks, rarely improving their bottom line. You can’t avoid these problems, and ignoring or mishandling them can be more expensive down the road. Though they’re essential, manually handling them isn’t an efficient decision.
That’s because they’ll require more money. To address that problem, you’ll have to use fleet management platforms that allow you to track metrics and automate specific tasks, making fleet management more efficient. Here are four productivity challenges managers encounter and how telematics solutions can help address these problems.
Handling Administrative Tasks
Only a few people love handling administrative tasks, including fleet managers. Tasks like scheduling fleet maintenance, keeping customers informed, dispatching, invoicing, quoting, and other time-consuming aspects. Inefficiently handling these tasks can lead to other fleet management problems, including less time to focus on revenue-generating tasks and reduced productivity. Using outdated, paper-based systems is another issue.
It prevents you from managing other problems. Focusing your attention on these tasks means that you’ll spend less time on revenue-generating aspects. You might want to consider swapping your outdated systems with an electronic one to get more time in handling administrative tasks within the shortest time possible.
Besides, it can reduce communication problems and other mistakes. Using telematics will also send maintenance reminders, automate scheduling drivers, and more.
Vehicle Maintenance Charges
On-time, regular maintenance is one of the biggest challenges a manager encounters, but it’s one of the best ways to keep your fleet productive. Unexpected breakdowns will cause lost productivity and delays, and not regularly maintaining your fleet will incur more damage and expensive repairs over time. For example, not checking the tires’ pressure or bringing the vehicles to a tint shop for high-quality film or paint protection can incur extra costs.
Tracking the maintenance schedules for your fleet can be time-consuming-time you might not have when dealing with the other aspects on your list. Using management systems that gather data from your vehicles’ engines will save you money and time. You can streamline preventive maintenance tasks to determine when you’ll have to bring your vehicles to the repair shop.
You can also set up alerts that will inform you when your fleet’s cars need unexpected maintenance based on the metrics from their engines. You can also set alerts based on hours of use, mileage, and time. Tracking and scheduling your maintenance will keep your vehicles on the road and save you money.
Dealing With Your Fleet Drivers
Driver productivity is another problem for fleet managers. Driver safety and behavior are also crucial matters. Likewise, the costs of losing drivers are high, and your good drivers are also a vital asset to your fleet. You’ve already invested in your drivers once you’ve started training and hiring them.
Your drivers’ safety and behavior on the road can offset this expense. Outlining a safety program and ensuring they follow it will reduce excessive acceleration, sudden braking, and unnecessary speeding.
Ignoring these behaviors can be hard on your fleet, resulting in excess wear and tear while also dangerous to other drivers. Training your drivers about safe driving and complying with traffic regulations will establish a safety culture for your fleet. Excess idling is another problem that can affect the engine’s operations, resulting in excess fuel consumption. You should train your drivers to avoid this to keep the costs down.
Monitoring and evaluating your drivers’ behavior with telematics and tracking software will allow you to review their behavior. It’ll also help you make decisions about how to help them follow safety standards and retrain. You can use your information to implement rewards programs for good behavior. It’ll also be the best way to improve the fleet’s training, further improving driver productivity.
Handling the Fleet’s Resources
You’ll have more things to think about if you’re managing a larger fleet. Your resources might not be fully used or disappear, causing your business to lose its investment and incur the additional costs of replacement. Utilizing fleet management systems will aid in managing your resources. You’ll realize that other assets are in the yard without anyone taking advantage of it or were sitting idle on the site.
GPS tracking ensures that drivers use your assets efficiently and determines which ones aren’t. You can base your purchasing decisions on this information. It’ll help determine if you should liquidate existing assets, what kind you should get, and when to acquire additional vehicles and other resources. Gathering that information will help you reveal potential costs savings to improve your bottom line.
To keep your drivers efficient and productive, you should be attentive to these common fleet management problems and solutions. Using fleet management software will aid in gathering the needed resources and information needed to face problems head-on.
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