Drivers who are up and down the country have numerous opportunities to pinch some fuel. On a 500 mile round trip, an extra 10 miles here and there to go and run their family errands won’t make much difference will it? Well if every employee thought like that, the mileage used would substantially increase and with fuel costs soaring and not on the decrease this can soon add up.
Also, if drivers are using different vehicles, it can be difficult to correlate who has used what vehicle on what day and patterns such as extra mileage being used or scrapes and scratches on vehicles can be missed. Keeping this information manually is a huge administrative burden, and a cost benefit analysis of the staff time needed against the potential savings can result in companies deciding it is not worthwhile. If certain vehicles are more prone to breakdown and certain drivers more prone to having accidents; spotting this can have a very real cost saving.
Access to vehicles miles per gallon performances are widely available, and can act as a good benchmark if you could keep track of what your vehicles were doing. This can highlight vehicles in the fleet that are inefficient and can act as an early warning sign that repairs are needed, before the problem is made worse resulting in much higher maintenance costs. Also, why keep vehicles that are not efficient?
Staff may complain that they are always the ones doing the long journeys, when in fact they only remember the long journeys they have made!! Having accurate information on driver assignments can ensure staff are treated fairly.
Yes fleet management software can be used to remind you about when MOT’s and services are due, but it can also keep a record of what showed up on these tests to see if there are any common themes developing across the fleet that need investigating.
Fleet management software can also help in ensuring some vehicles in the fleet are not overworked, whereas others sit idle, this can help in ensuring the size of the fleet is correct, after all you do not want to be buying vehicles and paying for their insurance, tax, servicing, and so on when you can cope without them.
Yes there is an initial cost upfront to fleet management software, but the savings can soon be reaped whist ensuring the administration nightmare of looking after the vehicles is no more.
Article written by James Gannon from Chevin Fleet; Fleet Management Software specialists.
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