Fleet management is a flourishing sector across continents with tremendous potential in-store. Today, the industry is moving from conventional paperwork, manual processes, and communication in silos. Instead, the tides are changing, with fleet operators embracing digital data and tech-based solutions - robotic process automation (RPA), advanced telematics, and 5G connectivity – to control costs and boost productivity.
Research indicates that fleet tracking technology has helped businesses improve their customer service by over 50%. Additionally, about a third of fleet managers have realized positive ROI within a year.
Given the rising expectations from consumers and e-commerce, fleet operators will bet heavily on deeper tech integrations and enhanced fleet management software features from now on. And as these trends keep on, they will up their ante in flexibility, agility, safety, and sustainability.
What is Fleet Management?
Fleet management is a set of complex tasks that keep an organization’s transit vehicles productive with the primary objective of higher efficiency and revenue optimization. It enables businesses to manage all data related to their vehicles and other assets, from acquisition through end of life, while focusing on other vital tasks.
Fleet management solutions generally deal with battery and fuel consumption, regulatory compliance, and driver overview. In addition, they provide managers with up-to-date details about vehicles' locations and jobs progress, enabling them to capitalize on the fleet's operational processes – all in a single integrated platform.
The Role of Fleet Managers
The role of fleet managers is wide-ranging, with pressures from all directions. From keeping vehicles up and running all along to ensuring regulatory compliance, a fleet manager’s job is a complicated one throughout.
Having said that, with state-of-the-art technologies gradually coming to the fore, the evolving role of fleet managers will become even more interesting. Here is a brief overview of the specific duties included in a fleet manager’s portfolio.
Getting the Right Vehicles
The first responsibility of fleet managers is ensuring that the organization harbors the appropriate number (and type) of automobiles, and that these automobiles work properly.
While adding each vehicle, fleet managers set multiple parameters, such as the number of pallets, load capacity, mileage, and distance. As a result, they monitor all the vehicles and identify the most suitable one for a specific type of cargo.
Proper Fleet Maintenance
Fleet managers ensure that their vehicles are in good condition for performing several functions. For that, they maintain a detailed history for all their vehicles, for instance, determining the last gear/engine oil change. Accordingly, fleet managers set up maintenance schedules, which the service division typically carries out. Moreover, they can outsource the vehicle maintenance to external automotive aftermarkets.
Registration, Licensing, and Compliance
Compliance is a massive challenge for transportation and trucking companies. Long-distance carriers, in particular, encounter several regulations. Case in point, every fleet vehicle needs to have functioning electronic logging devices (ELD), and every driver must fulfill hours of service (HOS) requirements.
Fleet managers deal with insurance claims and compliance issues and offer advice regarding the same, thus helping level up business performance and boost profitability by avoiding non-compliance costs.
Live Monitoring of all Drivers
Fleet managers ensure that their drivers are following the correct route. They examine the drivers' records to determine if they are correctly following routes and accordingly prepare procedures for common issues, such as driver absence, accidents, or inability to complete a delivery. They then reroute the drivers and modify the travel schedule as necessary.
This avoids wastage of travel time as drivers ride on the routes with reduced traffic or road mishaps.
Managing Finances
Fleet is one of the cost-consuming domains in several businesses, implying managing it is quintessential. As a result, fleet managers look after financial planning, curbing financial risk, and analyzing and optimizing whole-life costs. This is apart from the conventional duties of handling the fleet budget and participating in the organization’s procurement procedures.
7 Benefits of Effective Fleet Management
Fleet management solutions are the core aspect of several transportation businesses’ routine work; they help companies step up operational and cost-efficiency. Below are the benefits of leveraging fleet management automation for commercial automobiles:
- Safer Driving Experience
With fleet management software, companies can monitor every driver’s performance, background, capability, and behavior to accordingly assign them the delivery trips.
Additionally, fleet management software provides near real-time alerts about dangerous driving habits. For instance, video dashboard cameras enable fleet managers to track any cornering, speeding, or hard braking incidences.
By keeping virtual eyes on their drivers, fleet managers can easily monitor, tackle, and eventually decrease unsafe driving incidences.
- Optimized Route Planning
Fleet tracking systems help companies plan the days, routes, and distribution of their fleet effectively. With route optimization tools, fleet managers can discover the most time and cost-efficient routes quickly. Moreover, these tools help transportation services complete deliveries within a specific time frame to keep customers happy.
Furthermore, route optimization helps companies complete more jobs in a workday, meaning productivity and profitability go up by notches.
- Lower Fuel Usage
Ever-volatile fuel costs make it challenging for companies to properly monitor and budget their fuel consumption. However, using fleet management systems, companies can easily and quickly access fuel tracking data and spot saving potentials.
For instance, engine idling when a vehicle is stuck in heavy traffic. Comprehensive fuel monitoring insights will isolate necessary idling from excessive idling, allowing fleet managers to recognize and fix the problems. After highlighting the issue, managers can train their drivers on more efficient driving.
- Efficient Vehicle Maintenance
Fleet management software provides everything essential to devise a suitable preventive maintenance schedule for fleet vehicles, helping businesses control maintenance costs. By keeping tabs on engine hours, kilometers traveled, and fuel usage, fleet managers can deal with various vehicle-associated issues even before they occur.
Additionally, fleet management systems enable companies to monitor vehicle downtime due to jumpstarts, breakdowns, and emergency repairs. This helps identify potential weak spots and recurring patterns that need immediate attention or maintenance rescheduling.
- Real-time Updates
GPS vehicle monitoring enables fleet managers to follow their fleet on virtual screens in near real-time and replan vehicle routes whenever necessary. A clear picture of the vehicles’ current location, job completion status, and estimated arrival times (ETA) provide a deep dive into what is happening out there.
Not only will this boost dispatchers’ efficiency, but it will also help serve customers better and save fleet managers valuable time calling. No more calling drivers for information.
- Better Customer Satisfaction
If the drivers collaborate with consumers directly while on duty, businesses can leverage various fleet management software features to enhance ETA accuracy, optimize routing, and ensure zero-error deliveries. Moreover, as fleet managers have real-time information on the traffic and reasons for transportation delays, they can prioritize deliveries to privileged consumers.
Further, drivers see the customer locations on their dashboards and fine-tune work time according to the estimated time for deliveries. This approach allows fleet managers to focus on other important tasks and drivers to work as per the delivery requisites.
- Custom Reports
With custom reporting and analytics, organizations can extract data that offers a bigger picture of their fleet operations over a week, month, or year. These insights help fleet operators put red flags on patterns that demand immediate attention and make strategies for improvement accordingly.
Understand Fleet Management Industry Better with Beroe Report
Beroe offers market intelligence based on in-depth assessments of relevant data and indicators from diverse sources. Its research study on the global fleet management market arms businesses with local, regional, and global proficiency on industry and tech opportunities and trends. The exhaustive report entails updated pervasive insights, helping stakeholders in strategic decision-making and meeting their key business goals.
The analysts have implemented comprehensive and reliable qualitative and quantitative research to gather inputs from prominent market participants. Consequently, these inputs have helped them present the competitive landscape in a bigger frame.
Gain access to Beroe’s report on the global fleet management market for more information.