If you send employees out to meet with your customers, then fleet management is a crucial aspect of your business. But what is fleet management, exactly?
Below, we’ll give you a thorough explanation of this concept, and we’ll also show you how adopting fleet management software will improve your business. Read on if you’d like to find out how to reduce your expenses and make more money.
What Is Fleet Management?
Fleet management is an administrative approach for optimizing expenses, risks, and efficiency in fleet operations. It can be broken down into the following five fields:
- Operational cost-effectiveness
- Field employee management
- Improved efficiency
- Vehicle maintenance
- Vehicle safety and compliance
What Are The Benefits Of Fleet Management?
When fleet management is done right, it offers your business many benefits, such as:
- Maximizing profitability
- Improving productivity
- Lowering fuel consumption
- Improving driving habits
- Reducing road accidents
- Preventing unauthorized use of vehicles
- Tracking and recovering lost vehicles
- Increasing employee satisfaction by reducing driver frustration on the road
- Reducing insurance costs
- Cutting down on vehicle maintenance expenses
Let’s look at a few of those benefits in greater detail:
Reduce Fuel Expenses
Gas is one of your biggest expenses, right? In order to control your operating costs, you need to train your field employees to drive their fleet vehicles in the most fuel-efficient way possible.
A daily route planner can give you vehicle tracking capabilities, which allows you to detect speeding, idling, and other actions that waste gas. Whenever you see this kind of driving behavior, you can contact the offending team member and tell them to cut it out immediately.
You could also incentivize your field employees to save fuel by giving out rewards, such as gift cards or cash bonuses, to the field employees that display the best fuel efficiency.
Also, GPS tracking collects information for reporting and analytics, which will give you a better understanding of where your fuel costs are coming from (how much fuel each field employee is using, how much fuel each route should take, etc.).
You can even plug in the cost of gas in your area to project the fuel costs of a hypothetical route. This information will stop you from taking on new business that costs you more than it’s worth.
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Enhance Driver Safety
Speed kills. In addition to wasting gas, speeding puts your field employees at greater risk of getting into accidents.
But real-time tracking will show you when your team members are speeding, so you’ll be able to stop them.
Route4Me adds another layer of protection. It offers a Safety4Me tool that monitors each field rep’s driving behavior, and when a driver displays bad driving habits, the software automatically assigns the driver a customized training lesson. For example, if a driver brakes harshly, Safety4Me will assign them a lesson on braking. That way, your drivers always receive the exact kind of training they need.
Protect Your Vehicles and Cargo from Theft
Vehicle and cargo theft is a headache for any fleet manager. According to the FBI, American businesses lose almost $30 billion to cargo theft every year. And that figure’s probably lower than the real total: companies often don’t even report cargo crimes to avoid bad publicity and public embarrassment.
Route planners that come with a GPS tracking feature will help you protect your vehicles from theft. You can use it to track vehicle location on a map in real time. If a vehicle is ever stolen, you can provide police with data that leads them right to it.
Take Better Care Of Your Vehicles
A poorly maintained vehicle is at risk of suddenly breaking down, which can cause an accident.
Using a route planner will help you with preventative maintenance. It monitors the total distance covered per route, the number of stops made, the number of routes completed per day, and more. With this information, you can easily identify when each vehicle needs a tune-up, and it will improve your Inspection Selection System score as well.
Plan More Efficient Routes
Fleet management software gives you the ability to plan accurate and efficient routes in less than a minute. You just need to plug in the addresses of your customers, set the constraints (number of drivers, availability window for each customer, etc.), and that’s it. Then, you can complete more deliveries than before in the same amount of time.
The fleet management software will consider every factor that can affect your routes, such as traffic, weather, and construction. Your field employees will be able to avoid delays and show up to every stop on time. Your customers will love that!
The best route planners also offer the following features for making fleet operations more efficient:
- eSignature: Collect customer signatures faster and reduce paperwork
- Geofencing: Automate the process of checking in and out of each stop
- Add notes: Use text, audio, and video to give your field employees all the information they need
- Customer portal: Allow customers to track the field employee they’re waiting on
- Customer alerting and notifications: Automatically notify customers when the field employee they’re waiting on is about to arrive
- Barcode scanner: Automatically save scanned barcode data as custom data of the destination
- Dynamic stop insertion: Easily find the best route and order sequence for a particular address
So, do you have any questions about this article? Are you curious about similar topics, such as what is route optimization? Or maybe you want to know what is route management? Just let us know in the comments section below.
Finally, answering these three questions correctly will confirm that you understand how fleet management can benefit your business.
- What is fleet management?
- How can fleet management software help you reduce operational costs?
- How can asset tracking improve driver safety?
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
