What is Fleet Management?
Businesses in industries such as logistics, oil & gas, security, food & service, HVAC, insurance, and construction usually have fleets, and managing them can be challenging. Fleet management involves organizing and coordinating an organization's commercial vehicles to reduce costs, ensure compliance, and boost productivity.
What is a Fleet?
A fleet is a group of vehicles (cars, vans, trucks, etc.) leased or owned by a business, organization, or government agency. With fleets, organizations can increase the efficiency of their operations. Some functions of fleets include delivering goods to customers, carrying equipment, and traveling to a client's office or home.
An organization can have anywhere from five to hundreds of commercial vehicles. All these vehicles and drivers need to be tracked so that the company finds ways to increase efficiency, spend less, and offer better customer service. Fleet maintenance is all about making sure that fleet operations run smoothly and boosts a company's bottom line.
What is Meant by Fleet Management?
What is fleet management? It is the process of overseeing fleet operations. It focuses on tasks like monitoring driver behavior, observing vehicle maintenance schedules, introducing programs that foster productivity, determining the fastest/shortest routes, and checking fuel consumption.
To boost fleet performance, organizations use fleet telematics devices to monitor the vehicle's speed, get vehicle diagnostics alerts, and observe departure and arrival times.
What is the Purpose of Fleet Management?
Organizations and companies with fleets understand that fleet control is essential. In the past few years, there has been a growing use of telematics technology to optimize fleet performance. The mainfleet management purpose is to enable an organization to improve efficiency and productivity while spending less. Let's take a look at some benefits of fleet management system.
- It increases productivity: This is one of the main benefits of fleet management. With a telematics solution, an organization can keep track of important things like idle time, the safety of a vehicle, and maintenance schedules. For instance, when a vehicle breaks down, many hours may be lost trying to fix a mechanical issue, and this may cause delays. Having a system that monitors the health of a vehicle eliminates such problems.
- Driver safety: Statistics show that 27% of traffic fatalities on Canadian roads are caused by speeding. This means that companies need to monitor their drivers' behaviours on the road continually. A fleet management software provides real-time updates on dangerous driver habits such as hard braking, speeding, and cornering.
- Improves customer service: A GPS tracking solution for fleets enables businesses to better their customer service. By planning routes, fleet managers can find which route a particular vehicle can use to reach its destination within a short time. Also, tracking makes it possible for a customer to know when they should expect deliveries or services. This way, a business can retain its customers and gain more through referrals.
- Keeps fuel costs low: AÂ GPS tracking device can significantly reduce the cost of fuel. First, you can easily track idling time per vehicle and use the information to advise the drivers not to leave the engine running when the car is stationary. Note that larger vehicles consume more fuel when idling. Optimization of routes is another strategy that can be used to reduce the consumption of fuel. Fleet managers have access to data such as the position and destination of every vehicle and receive alerts on weather and traffic. If there is a snarl-up in a specific area, drivers can find and use more efficient routes. Distance to a specific destination can be decreased by using the vehicle closest to it, thus reducing fuel use.
How Does Fleet Management Work?
Cellutrak provides GPS tracking solutions to help you track, recover, and manage all your vehicles. Some of the industries we target include construction & heavy equipment, finance, local delivery, roofing, landscaping, snow removal, government, and HVAC & plumbing.
Your fleet department can use our fleet management software to perform the following tasks:
- Real-time GPS tracking with updates sent to the web-based software or an application on your smartphone.
- Receive automatic alerts such as low battery alerts, arrival and departures from designated regions, etc.
- Get advanced telematics reporting where you will be receiving information like mileage and activity milestones.
You can see that fleet management using GPS is not just about tracking the location of a vehicle. The custom reports provided to fleet managers allow them to develop the best ways to improve the fleets' efficiency.
Businesses and organizations need a fleet management system to ensure operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, driver safety, vehicle maintenance, and legislative compliance. All this can be done using fleet management and telematics software. Get in touch with us to access our full GPS tracking services.
