What is fleet management?
Fleet management gives companies a way to oversee their entire fleet operation while maintaining all the different tasks required of fleet owners. With the use of this important process on the rise, it’s vital you know what types of things it involves. This guide breaks down what fleet management is, why it’s important and how you can avoid unnecessary headaches implementing it.
What is fleet management?
Fleet management is a way, through an administrator or software system, to oversee all fleet maintenance and efficiency to ultimately build better business workflows. Fleet management often deals with areas like fuel and battery usage, driver overview and route breakdowns.
Businesses generally choose either to place an employee in charge of all fleet management, or they implement fleet management software.
What areas does fleet management cover/oversee?
The process of fleet management spans an extremely wide range of different tasks and processes. Here are the most important things that fleet management can help businesses control.
1. Tracking financial impacts
Fleet management provides a clear overview of what types of measures are helping or harming a business financially. This includes giving insight into money-saving methods by weeding out unnecessary tasks within all fleet processes.
2. Overall safety measures
When it comes to safety measures, fleet management is tasked with finding all the possible deficiencies and fixing them. It also creates new ideas to provide safer processes and monitors the entirety of the fleet’s current tasks to see how safe they are.
3. Route-efficiency
Fleet management handles topics such as mapping routes to make sure that customers are happy, drivers are safer and productive, and all other factors are efficient.
4. Fleet monitoring
Fleet management systems typically have some type of digital way to monitor an entire fleet and better control potential deficiencies or errors before they occur. This indirectly ensures deliveries and other usage are straightforward and don’t veer off into unpermitted use.
5. Regulatory management
Fleet management also helps control all potential regulatory issues concerning fleet vehicles, including legislation issues, fuel taxes and other compliance tasks.
6. Fuel and Battery management
With the landscape of both fuel and batteries for e-vehicles constantly changing, having a system in place that monitors all these is helpful. Fleet management ensures there’s an overarching process to keep fuel and battery usage and expenditures within a business’s budget.
Main benefits
When we think of how complex the overseeing of even a handful of vehicles is, it makes it a lot clearer why fleet management is so vital. Fleet management gives businesses a chance to better handle intricate daily tasks. The following are the most common benefits.
- Better control of fleet operations. The lack of comprehensive overview is a problem for so many vehicle businesses. Fleet management simplifies the entire process and gives control to admins.
- Improved bottom line. No matter the costs of a fleet manager or fleet management software system, its implementation immediately affects a company’s bottom line.
- Better customer/driver satisfaction. Whether your vehicles are used internally to make deliveries or for customer use, a fleet management ensures satisfaction of all parties who use them.
- Fuel/Battery efficiency. Fleet management ensures fuel or battery usage is straightforward and efficient without any wastefulness.
- Accurate data collection and interpretation. Fleet management gives users a way to see the right data at the right time and make the correct conclusion about these pieces of information.
Potential roadblocks for fleet management
In order for fleet management to work optimally, there are a few issues that need to be solved. The first involves actually sourcing and purchasing a fleet of vehicles. The challenges that come with this task involve finding bulk options that fit your needs while staying within the limitations of your area’s legislation.
Another roadblock involves the safety of all those involved with using your fleet. Fleet management won’t be effective if it doesn’t take into account the after-effects of vehicle accidents and user injury – because they unfortunately will happen.
Lastly, the biggest issue facing companies is finding the right systems to handle their fleet management. There is a true disconnect between many fleet management software companies and their customers, often created by differences such as location or necessary processes. The best solution to this is extensive research before implementing any new systems. If you’re managing a fleet of vehicles to share, it’s best to use vehicle sharing software.
When you focus on fleet management, your fleet is optimized and daily processes are handled much better. Consider the type of system that would best benefit your business.