Small to medium-size fleet operations can often face challenges in staying competitive, which can be extremely important in keeping the lights on as inflation continues and consumer spending is projected to decline in 2024. Securing enough of the budget for vehicle and/or equipment procurement, increased labour hours, or other needs can be a difficult process. Fleet management software (FMS) can help put fleets in a better position to advocate for resources or reallocate resources by cutting costs where possible.
Cutting Costs and Creating Convenience
FMS is an integrated solution fleets can use alone or in conjunction with other fleet and business solutions. It provides a centralised platform that automatically collects and consolidates data from disparate solutions and aggregates the data into easy-to-analyse reports. This provides real-time visibility into assets, from vehicles to tools and parts inventories — even trade supplies — reducing administrative burdens and allowing for quick decision-making around cost control and reduction.
Asset service and petrol are two of the largest cost centres for fleets. FMS can help fleets improve maintenance schedules to reduce unplanned downtime and work replication, which contribute to cost increases, as well as productivity and profitability loss. Preventive maintenance (PM) can be tailored to each asset or asset group using information gleaned from inspections and service histories, which can surface high-wear and high-fail items. Service reminders in FMS ensure anyone who needs to know about scheduled maintenance is automatically alerted. This vastly improves PM compliance rates and reduces pick-up and drop-off delays, as well as delays in the shop.
For small- to medium-size fleets servicing assets in-house, minimising the time it takes to complete service tasks can be hugely impactful to make the most of available resources. Fleets can use work orders in FMS to more precisely track the time it takes to perform tasks in addition to tracking typical line items like parts used, assigned technician, and cost. Technicians can even communicate to the driver, manager, or whomever needs to be informed within the work order itself, keeping task-related communication easy and transparent. Fleets can also filter through historical work order data to see which technicians are more proficient at which tasks to improve labour assignments. This increases service efficiency and allows fleets to schedule services more accurately to further reduce unnecessary downtime.
Image: Fleetio
When it comes to tackling petrol cost management, FMS provides an easy method to track consumption and costs, as well as filling location and kilometres driven. This data surfaces per-kilometre operating cost for individual assets, asset groups, and the fleet as a whole. Integrating other petrol tracking methods into FMS provides more accurate, timely data accumulation and allows you to see into your fleet’s petrol usage more thoroughly for insights into:
- Petrol spend as it relates to daily operations, including use at jobsites, to determine true cost of projects
- Petrol spend by operator to determine asset or petrol purchasing misuse
- Petrol spend by asset to determine potential mechanical issues and replacement cycles
These insights allow small- and medium-size fleets to gain better control over unnecessary petrol spend by reducing excess fuel consumption issues related to maintenance and driver behaviour. By reducing both service and petrol costs, fleets can make room in the budget to reallocate resources, advocate for additional resources, or keep business prices competitive by absorbing the savings and transferring that to potential customers.
Data-driven Decision-making
While service and petrol metrics are quite useful in understanding costs, looking at data points separately doesn’t give a full picture of what’s going on in the fleet. Data collected from work orders, inspections, parts inventories, fueling, and more work together to create a full story as to what caused a breakdown, what’s causing delays in the shop and why petrol spend or consumption has increased, among other things.
Being able to drill down to the source of issues means the ability to correct those issues effectively and in a timely manner. For small- to medium-size fleets, this means having access to configurable reports that offer an in-depth view of operations, something FMS provides. Reports in FMS use all available data to give a complete view of metrics comprised of various data points. This makes it easier to advocate for resources by:
- Quantifiably showing the need for asset replacement through cost analysis and projected new asset ROI
- Quantifiably showing downtime associated with understaffing by comparing the amount of time an asset is in the shop to the amount of time the actual service takes. If a vehicle spends three days in the shop for an oil change, that is probably a solvable problem
From asset performance to operating costs, FMS can provide the necessary data for informed decision-making, giving smaller fleets a competitive edge.
Author: Rachael Plant, content marketing specialist for Fleetio.
