As a fleet manager, your responsibilities are broad and varied, often with multiple areas to juggle across your entire fleet operation. From managing schedules and routes, vehicle safety, compliance, driver training and vehicle maintenance to fuel consumption and budgets, the role requires substantial multi-tasking and organisational skills.
Knowing how productive your fleet is, is fundamental to the efficiency of your overall fleet operation. In order to establish a productive fleet, fleet managers find themselves constantly monitoring how to get the best performance from their fleets, drivers and assets while simultaneously trying to reduce costs, increase efficiency and maintain safety.
That’s why when it comes to successfully operating an efficient fleet of any size, it’s important to have a set of realistic targets and KPIs in place, in order to make improvements and help you achieve your goals. Tracking the right KPIs will allow you to gain valuable insight into your fleet’s performance to help you to make more strategic decisions for the business.
Understanding Fleet Metrics
With so much data easily available to you across all aspects of your fleet, how you leverage that information ultimately determines the success of your fleet.
Making the right decisions for your fleet operation starts and ends with monitoring fleet metrics. When it comes to fleet management, understanding the inefficiencies within your fleet that need improvement is crucial - and there’s certainly no shortage of areas to keep close track of.
Here, we explore some of the more common metrics to track in fleet management.
Inspection results
Regular driver vehicle inspections keep fleets compliant and safe on the road. regulations and keep fleets safe on the road. Inspection reports are created by drivers before they take vehicles out on the road and can be tracked using fleet management software allowing fleet managers to keep up to date on their vehicles’ health. Analysing the data in these reports can help you identify common problems within your fleet. Viewing these patterns can help you plan and implement preventative maintenance measures faster and minimise vehicle downtime.
Preventative maintenance practices
Vehicle downtime and unplanned maintenance pose a substantial threat to running costs and the level of service your business is able to provide.
Implementing a preventative maintenance schedule is one of the best ways to improve the lifespan of your vehicles and assets and save on costly repairs, allowing you to monitor and analyse your routine maintenance.
In order to prevent vehicles from undergoing unexpected maintenance, regular daily vehicle checks need to be carried out with all checks recorded so that vehicles with recurring issues can easily be identified and improvements in the efficiency of your fleet can easily be made.
Repair turnover
Preventing downtime is always an important issue for fleet managers- every time a vehicle is not on the road when it should be, is losing money.
Whether your vehicles are being repaired in-house or outsourced to a third party, tracking how much time they are spending in the workshop for repairs, helps ensure that repairs can be made on time with a record of status updates and historical repairs.
Setting a KPI around the amount of downtime your vehicles are off the road can help uncover potential gaps in your maintenance operations or the lifespan of specific vehicles.
By adopting a fleet management software solution you are able to easily keep updates and reports on your vehicles through the maintenance processes you have in place.
Fuel management
Fuel is one of the most significant ongoing expenses for fleets, therefore it's vital to monitor its usage and spending closely. Idling and poor driver behaviour are key contributing factors to an increase in fuel consumption which in turn leads to an increase in fuel costs.
Monitoring these factors through the use of telematics allows you to easily identify high fuel consumption actions, such as heavy acceleration and harsh braking as well as idling.
From here, you can benchmark the frequency of these actions and implement initiatives such as driver training to improve driver performance which can in turn, positively impact the reduction of fuel costs,
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Establishing your fleet’s true total cost of ownership is truly valuable when it comes to assessing how much your vehicles are actually costing the business.
It's not enough to only look at the basics such as fuel costs, maintenance costs, and costs per mile. You also need to take into account the bigger picture of how much your vehicles are costing you; the purchase price, the cost of downtime as well as the replacement cost.
However, understanding your fleet's total cost of ownership allows you to make decisions confidently based on all the data presented and how you can effectively maximise cost efficiency.
Using fleet management software can help calculate the total ownership cost from the fleet data's aggregate. A breakdown of the fleet expenses gives you a perfect understanding of the return on investment and where you are losing money. It also helps you understand strategies which can be used to determine the most suitable solutions for preventive maintenance vehicle replacement in the future.
How Prolius can help you track your fleet metrics
Most successful organisations use KPIs and metrics to track their progress and measure growth as a business. For fleet managers,
in order to successfully track fleet KPIs, it’s helpful to have a comprehensive fleet management software system in place.
Prolius Fleet helps you track all the important data you need and can generate reports based on your specific KPIs so you can see where you are and how to get where you want to be. Get in touch or book your free demo today.