In this day and age, attributing the success of one company to a singular factor is really not possible. But, at the same time, we can’t deny that one business’s agility, nimbleness, and the ability to quickly deliver its goods to the consumers make an incredibly important block in building a successful enterprise.
Of course, all these things wouldn’t be able without an efficient and well-maintained business fleet capable of reaching the operational goals without burning excessive amounts of money. Otherwise, all the results you manage to score could easily end up compromised.
Let us take a look then at a couple of ways you can meet both these ends and save money with effective corporate fleet management while also retaining the mobility necessary for successful commerce.
Pick the right vehicles
Yes, the choice of vehicles will have a great impact on all of your subsequent decisions and failing to get the cars that are able to demonstrate a great level of stamina while keeping the consumption on the bearable levels. Keeping in mind how taxing the modern traffic can be and the growing price of fossil fuels, we suggest that you offset some of these issues by gradually moving to hybrid or even electric vehicles. Granted, replacing the entire fleet in one run can prove to be very expensive, but when some vehicle becomes too expensive to maintain this should be the direction in which you should be looking at.
Provide drivers with the necessary training
This measure shouldn’t imply that your employees don’t know how to drive. You should just give them guidelines on how to do what they do the best in the most efficient and sustainable manner. If we take Australia as an example of e developed country with developed sustainability habits, we will see that as much as 33% of drivers are not aware that harsh braking and dramatic acceleration can have a drastic effect on fuel consumption. These and similar wrinkles can be easily ironed out if you bring in a couple of professional educators that can point out a couple of mistakes the drivers are usually making.
Find the reliable maintenance crew
To put it simply, vehicles that are not in pristine condition are far more likely to waste fuel and entail additional repair costs than the ones maintained regularly. However, the repair frequency is not the only factor impacting the efficiency of your vehicles. You absolutely need to make sure your vehicles are handled by top-tier professionals with the best possible equipment.
If we, once again, go Down Under for example we will see will find very companies providing quality services of e-safety check in Sydney and other metropolitan areas. This is a good sample of the services you should be looking for at home.
Pen down a thorough inspection and maintenance plan
These simple strategies will help you to always stay on schedule, make an easier job of keeping the proper documentation and introduce a healthy dose of standardization in your fleet operations. While you are doing that, be sure to ask for the opinion of your drivers and maintenance staff since their insights may prove to be invaluable.
Also, when you finish compiling the inspections and maintenance procedures make sure to make the documents are made publicly available and easy to access. Some of the most critical instructions and reminders should be displayed in form of labels, or color-coded signalization.
Leverage the benefits of fleet telematics systems
If you are not familiar with the term, telematics represents the GPS location systems and onboard vehicle diagnostics wrapped into one neat package. This technology allows you not only to determine where your vehicles are at any given moment but also to identify how well are they performing and are they scoring some off-the-baseline metrics. All these things open up endless possibilities in terms of more efficient fleet management allowing you to:
- Identify where to refuel to reduce additional commuting costs
- Identify the optimal routes for your vehicles
- Improve the safety of your drivers by identifying the vehicle issues as they appear
- Identify faults in driver behavior and correct these mistakes
- Reduce the insurance costs by encouraging drivers to drive more responsibly
Start using fleet management software
Last but not least, we would like to point out that even though all the tasks we have listed above can be performed by your employees, the AI presents a much more efficient solution when it comes to handling vast sets of data and complex calculations that are associated with fleet management.
That is why using some of the contemporary AI-powered can lend your company some much-needed speed and agility while allowing your employees to focus on the management of human resources and decision-making. The expenses you will need to make to get these platforms will be, at some point, returned in greater efficiency.
We hope these few examples gave you a general idea about strategies you can use to improve the overall effectiveness of your corporate fleet while, at the same time, reducing the costs it is producing. Of course, these ideas should only be used as a foundation, but you will be able to draw out more specific moves once you lay down these critical cornerstones. The most important is that you start doing something about this issue, and start cutting any kind of waste as soon as possible.
