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9 Secrets to Reducing your Fleet Expenses
As a fleet owner, your day-to-day costs can quickly add up. What you don’t know is there are further hidden, expensive...
Read moreThere are many ways fleet management technology can help field service businesses overcome the challenges they face every day. With a comprehensive solution you could manage all your work from a central portal, dispatch quickly and get total visibility of your operation.
When it comes to building a business case for implementing such technology, however, there are two main areas of focus – saving money and boosting revenues.
A fleet management system can help to achieve these aims, from reducing waste to helping to fit more jobs into the working day. Here are just a few examples.
How to save money with fleet management technology
Reduce fuel waste: Fuel is one of the most significant costs facing any fleet. While it is, of course, a necessity, there are many ways to reduce your overall consumption.
Tracking certain driver behaviours is a great way to do this. Aggressive driving, sharp acceleration, and idling are all wasteful practices that can potentially increase fuel consumption.
By monitoring instances of such behaviours with a fleet management system, you can spot repeat offenders and coach them into more fuel-efficient driving styles.
Get proactive with maintenance: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is certainly true when it comes to maintaining your fleet vehicles.
Ignoring a rattle or a whistle today could mean major damage and hefty repair bills further down the line. What’s more, vehicle condition such as tyre pressure, filter cleanliness, and engine tuning can all have a bearing on MPG.
With a fleet solution in place, you can set reminders for specific events such as servicing or oil changes, by time, mileage, or engine hours. This proactive approach can help to lower maintenance costs, improve fuel economy and potentially increase the life of your vehicles.
Make every mile count: The most expensive mile is one that you didn’t need to take. That’s why any way to streamline mileage can only help to save your business money.
A fleet management solution can automatically schedule your daily jobs in the most efficient order, accounting for a range of factors and matching customer requirements to your available resources. This method of planning has been shown to reduce average fleet mileage by up to 10%.
And if, for any reason, a driver is required to return to a job, simply use the map feature to find and reroute the nearest worker in just a few clicks.
How to make money with fleet management technology
Make your customers happy: Acquiring new customers is often costlier than keeping the ones you already have. Keeping your customers happy and loyal to your business can only help to boost revenues in the long term.
With a fleet management solution in place, you can give you customers what many of them crave, visibility of your operation. With near real-time location tracking, you can keep them informed of delays and provide accurate and timely ETAs.
Flexible planning tools can also help you meet specific and demanding customer SLAs such as service windows, and driver, or vehicle attributes.
Do more jobs: For most fleets, more jobs equal more money – so the more work you can do with the resources you already have, the greater the profitability of your fleet.
A fleet management solution can help you do exactly that. With fully automated and optimised routing, you have the potential to fit more jobs into the standard working day. Plus, near real-time location information allows you to quickly find and reallocate the nearest available driver as soon as a new job comes in.
Drive ROI: Implementing a comprehensive fleet management system should be viewed as an investment rather than a cost.
When leveraged to its potential, a fleet management solution can pay for itself and more within a matter of months. In fact, almost half of businesses with comprehensive solutions realise ROI on their system within six months or less.
This ROI can be realised in numerous ways, from spotting and repurposing underused resource to automating key process and driving productivity across the board.
