June 21, 2018 Fleet Management: Ready to Go Digital?

If you own a fleet of business vehicles, how do you ensure they are safe and performing efficiently? By going digital!

No matter what size of fleet you rely on for your business, you need to ensure that the vehicles that you use operationally are safe and can provide the functions and performance that you require from them. If your drivers are not on the road, you will not be making money, so regularly inspecting and maintaining your vehicles is critical to your business’s success.

Keeping track of your vehicles is a necessary responsibility that you have, and you may have been highly successful in doing so over the years; however, now may be the time to digitalize your fleet management, to ensure that you are running it at peak efficiency. Here are five ways that digital fleet tracking can help your business:

1. Vehicle Maintenance

To get the most out of your vehicles they need to be maintained to the manufacturer’s recommendations, but if your fleet consists of different brands of vehicles, you may make an error in recording when inspections need to be made. You can now use technology to track and remind you of the vehicle’s maintenance schedule, and that means oil changes, brake pads, bulb checks on the trailer light boards can be easily recorded. Some technologies even alert you when there is a maintenance issue that needs attention.

2. Fuel Management

You will more than likely track the mileage of each vehicle within your fleet, but do you ever review the information and combine it with the gas costs to calculate the efficiency? Wasted fuel by inefficient driving costs businesses money, and you can use technology to monitor gas spend, and if the driver of the vehicle has any need for further training.

3. Driver Behavior

As mentioned above, the skills of the driver affect the gas efficiency of the vehicle. Advances in technology now allow for driver behavior to be monitored for safety reasons but also to push forward more efficient driving skills. Bad driving means that vehicles suffer from unnecessary wear and tear as well as not being efficient regarding gas consumption. Monitoring driver behavior increases driver safety and decreases gas spend.

4. Vehicle Tracking

There are many reasons your business can benefit from your fleet’s vehicles being tracked. For example, you can track in real time the location of the loads so that you can inform customers the expected time of arrival, and you can have accurate figures for calculating salary.

The main benefit of vehicle tracking is the ability to have a record of the number of hours a driver has been on the road. This is important for being able to comply with federal legislation that restricts the number of hours a truck driver can legally be on the road.

5. Environmentally friendly

When you can monitor your vehicle’s fuel efficiency, maintenance schedules and driver behaviors, your fleet should now be running at peak performance which invariably means that you are greener. When your business fulfills green credentials, you should use this as a selling point for your services, goods or products. Environmentally friendly is attractive to consumers.

Going digital can feel like a big step, especially if you have a small fleet, but by paying attention to how your vehicles are maintained, driven and used means that their function can be streamlined to improve efficiencies.

James Daniels is a freelance writer, business enthusiast, a bit of a tech buff, and an overall geek. He is also an avid reader, who can while away hours reading and knowing about the latest gadgets and tech, whilst offering views and opinions on these topics. jdwrites93@gmail.com

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