Saving money and staying on budget can be a necessity for fleet operations. That’s why it’s important to streamline operating procedures, reduce inefficiencies, boost productivity and increase revenue.
One way to accomplish these goals is by implementing fleet management software. These solutions can help keep your operation organized and on track to hit your financial goals.
Learn how using fleet management software can help save your fleet operation money.
Reducing vehicle downtime can be one of the biggest benefits when it comes to eliminating wasted revenue. How many vehicles in your fleet are out of service right now because of unscheduled repairs or maintenance? How much is this downtime costing your business daily?
Fleet management software reduces downtime through preventative maintenance tracking, allowing you to repair or replace parts and equipment before they break. This way you can keep more vehicles in service and out of the shop.
Fleets usually operate under either preventative or reactive maintenance. Reactive maintenance is when action is taken after a part or piece of equipment fails. Preventative maintenance allows you to detect or mitigate the potential failure, allowing you to reduce downtime and increase the lifespan of the asset.
Fleet management software allows you to keep close tabs of your parts inventory. This can include ways to track all available parts, take inventory with the assistance of barcode scanners, and set up parameters to automatically reorder parts when inventory levels hit a certain threshold. Using these tools will help you avoid overstocking and over-ordering parts.
Fleet management software allows you to manage more than your vehicles – it also lets you track work orders to monitor your technicians’ productivity. Through the software you can track which work orders have been completed, which are open, and which are delayed. You can also track labor hours to see how long technicians are spending on jobs.
Fleet management software can perform the following tasks:
Fuel can be a fleet operation’s second-largest expense. Because of that, it’s important to know how much is being used, and by which drivers and which vehicles. Using the fuel tracking tools in fleet management software solutions can help operations track vehicle odometers during refueling, monitor how many miles per gallon vehicles are getting, and potentially identify misuse of fuel by monitoring how often drivers are refueling vehicles.
It’s important for fleet operations to know how each type of tire from various manufacturers is performing. Tracking key information in fleet management software allows operations to identify how many miles they are getting on each tire, the average lifespan, and the cost-per-mile of tires from each manufacturer. This will help you identify which vendors and manufacturers to order from in the future.
One of the easiest ways to improve your fleet operation’s bottom line is by improving your warranty recovery. Each year operations may lose thousands of dollars in unclaimed warranties. Tracking these in your fleet management software solution can help add money to your operation.
In the software, operations can enter warranty information on each part when it’s entered into the system. Then, when the vehicle comes in for repairs, the solution can flag if a repair is under warranty. This alerts the operation to hang onto the part and create a claim for it.
The system can also track when warranties expire, allowing you to inspect the parts before the warranty expires.