Fleet management is essential in operating a successful fleet service. There are many ways to support your workforce, analyze data and ensure your business model is working in the most efficient way. For all these reasons and more, fleet automation is the key to streamlining your service, to make it both reliable and profitable.
There are many benefits to automation, from employee morale and support, to fuel monitoring and route planning. Here are 4 of the top reasons why streamlining your business is a given once you start to automate your service. Here, you can read more about this.
1. Vehicle & asset tracking
Ensuring the safety of your drivers is of the utmost importance. Using location services and video footage to track your drivers, assets, and vehicles is essential in making sure safety is put first. As management occurs from a distance, training, and implementation of company values and strategies can be hard to monitor. It is important to have fleet management systems in place to ensure you can support your fleet drivers remotely.
Supporting drivers is essential in ensuring retention within your team, as drivers are in short supply. This is why managing your drivers will not only ensure quality but the longevity of your fleet employee retention. To improve and streamline internal communication with your drivers, you could use an SMS service which enables you to boost your business. SMS is a great way to send instant notifications and alerts to your drivers. It’s a fast, easy, and reliable tool to add to your communication mix.
2. Maintain and repair vehicles
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A large cost within the fleet management industry is that of maintenance and repairs. Keeping up to date with vehicle maintenance is essential in being able to consistently deliver a high-quality service.
As much as you must depend on your drivers, it’s important to objectively monitor the performance of all of your fleet vehicles. When you automate this process, servicing, repairs, and check-ups are pre-booked to ensure safety is prioritized.
3. Digital document logs
Part of automation is keeping all documents and data digitized for both ease and streamlining purposes. By keeping track of driver logs, receipts and orders, you can effectively track the way in which your business is running and therefore, evaluate if it is being run in the most efficient way.
Part of automation and streamlining is the ability to increase efficiency. Within your company, strategies to support your business and employees are significant when streamlining. Misplaced documents are a thing of the past with digital logs as they hold everyone accountable due to the nature of tracking software. Some companies have found in document control software the solution to streamline their process in a more effective manner to effectively and efficiently manage the process.
4. Fuel Management
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Fleet management must control spending to ensure that total costs are as low as possible. This is a large part of strategizing business plans. The best way to control fuel costs is through using a three-fold approach.
1. Fuel monitoring system
Monitoring fuel will give you the ability to analyze costs more closely and support your team with reducing costs. This is one of the shell fuel card benefits as you can track fuel spend for your entire fleet. Additionally, using a complete fuel management software will help automate the process for you.
2. Monitor drivers
The way in which your workforce drive may be increasing fuel consumption. Streamlining your management involves training employees to ensure they know the risks associated with speeding, harsh braking, and idle driving so that you can track efficiency.
3. Analyze your results
Once you have your systems in place, you must collate the data for analysis. This data will tell you your operational costs, fuel consumption, driver productivity and allow you to optimize all current operations.
Fraud Prevention
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No matter how much you think you trust your fleet of drivers, fraud is still a very common occurrence in the fleet management industry. For example, many drivers attempt to use their fuel cards outside of work hours to receive the perks and discounts for their own personal fuel consumption.
Automation will prevent these types of misdemeanors by tracking fuel spending and monitoring how much should have been spent compared to the miles driven. Although this behavior has no serious criminal intent, such wrongdoings will amount to unnecessary costs and a breakup of trust between you and your drivers.
Transparency
You will be able to track all of your business operations and follow each vehicle and driver of your fleet. All of your processes will become transparent and the information shared between driver and management can be tracked and monitored through an openly automated system.
Live locations of your drivers can be shared with both customers and management teams whenever needed to make sure you know where your driver is at all times. Plus, real-time updates can be provided if necessary in order for booking confirmations and smooth transitions to take place. Ultimately this transparency will lead to happier customers and a better transport service that’s fast, efficient, and openly shared with those needing to see the information.
Route Planning
Source: digitalconnectmag.com
With smart tech now competently monitoring routes, automation can also make smart decisions on route scheduling. Some automated schedules may take easier and faster routes than the human decisions made by your drivers, but of course, that also depends on the experience and knowledge of your team.
Incoming changes and reorders can now be completed by the automated tech, meaning you do not need a manager to manually reschedule plans. Instead, the Route4Me Route Planning Software can replan the upcoming routes for you. Best of all, these automated decisions ultimately mean you can complete more routes in less time.
Green solutions
All of the points made above means your business can operate as a greener and more eco-friendly business. This alone is a huge incentive to switch to automation because 92% of people have said they’re much more likely to trust a business if they are environmentally conscious. So make the most of this opportunity and make sustainability a priority for how you operate.
So how does automation allow you to become a greener fleet management company?
1. Reduced carbon emissions
With automation shortening and optimizing driving routes, fuel consumption will be reduced too. The less fuel your business uses across your fleet, the better your carbon footprint will be overall.
2. Use less paper
Managing your fleet through automation means your data and information are stored digitally. You’ll be using fewer resources by generating invoices electronically. The demand for paper will therefore be significantly lowered.
