As the trucking sector grows increasingly crowded by the mile, the processes to keep your fleet safe, optimized, and accountable can come at a snail’s pace. In this article, we’ll explore what’s necessary to manage a modern fleet. From dispatch apps to driver tracking all the way to cost saving and sustainability, we’ll dive into what can make or break your modern fleet on a management level.
What is Modern Fleet Management
Fleet Management is the fundamental cog that works behind the scenes of any business that heavily uses transportation for their products, production, or services to control cost, reduce risks, and optimize the processes involved in getting things from point a, b, c, or otherwise. When managing a modern fleet, the onus of spinning all of the plates in the air simultaneously, while juggling the ever-shifting needs of clients or deliveries would simply be impossible without splitting the load between different departments.
What are the Departments of Fleet Management
Modern fleet management is normally broken down into five to eight different categories. Though a company’s size and sector can inform how departments are formed or handled, the brunt of the work each of these silos focuses on needs to be accounted for and acted upon in some way, even if consolidated.
Compliance & Driver Safety
From a ground-level perspective, the department that handles driver safety and compliance will make sure that a fleet’s drivers all have their commercial driver’s licenses and the correct endorsements. In a top-down view, this department also handles making sure that drivers are prepared and abreast of local, regional, and federal rules of the roads they’ll be driving down, while making sure that they’re off the roads when approaching the legal limits of drive time.
With the use of AI-enabled dashcams, there is less hand-holding needed on the active safety side of driver safety. These new systems allow for cab driver monitoring, ELD-like tracking for compliance, and the bonus of protecting liability in the unfortunate event of a crash. Some systems even allow you to grade your drivers so they can know how they can better protect themselves on the road by informing them of bad habits that can be rectified.
Spend Management
In a world where fuel costs fluctuate, controlling and tracking fuel costs, per diem, and incidentals easily are key, and at scale could be a nightmare. Many modern fleets employ the use of controlled company cards that can cap and track spending, which eliminates the cumbersome tasks of drivers keeping track of receipts and admins having to manually input them. Oftentimes these fleet-specific cards include fuel benefits alleviating some of the stress of the yo-yo pricing of today’s fuel.
Tracking
If you have trucks on the road, that means they should be going somewhere, and if you can track your phone, why shouldn’t you be able to track your trucks? Though knowing the physical location of your fleet is ideal, it’s just one piece of this multi-cylindered puzzle.
Modern fleet management tools can help you track the refrigeration units on your reefer trucks, fuel economy of routes for optimization, and driver efficiency. With the right modern fleet management tool, you can find the exact profitability of each of your drivers to the hour.
Telematics
A large part of tracking systems used in modern fleet management is handled by telematics. Telematics allows fleet owners to monitor the internal ongoings of a truck from miles away with the use of GPS and onboard diagnostics systems. This method logs the movements with the diagnostic information including mileage, fuel usage, and other useful points of contact that will alert you if something is out of the ordinary, failing, or just right.
Dispatch & Workflow
The first thing that comes to mind when most people think of fleet management is dispatch. Whether you have one truck or one thousand trucks on the road, unless you’re driving every one of them yourself, you’re going to need to dispatch and manage the workflow (and load) of your drivers. Though a traditional calendar may be great for certain tasks, managing a fleet of drivers for pickups, drop offs, and load switching aren’t one. The right fleet management tool should provide drivers and admins with mobile-friendly updates and road-ready applications. These apps should tell your driver where they need to be when they need to be there, and whatever else they need, from truck assignment to trailer needs.
Inversely, modern fleet management tools should help your operations team understand delivery progress, order management, and give an overall top-down view of the fleet’s live location, and allow for full transparency of every step of the haul.
Maintenance
One of the perfect pairings of a modern fleet management tool is the ability for telematics to meet the reporting that comes with tracking almost everything, which inserts maintenance into a fleet’s standard operation. There is nothing worse than being late unless you’re late because of something completely preventable.
A fleet management tool will allow you to track your individual trucks, maintenance schedules, and any underlying problems any assets may have.
Sustainability
With impending regulations sweeping the world regarding fuel efficiency and emissions controls, environmental sustainability has moved to the forefront of many companies’ minds. Moving to a modern fleet management tool allows you to modify your fleet’s behavior and focus on your environmental impact with ease. With the implementation of a fleet management tool, your route and load optimization are paired with the right drivers and better fuel economy.
Is Fleet Management Really Important?
If after reading all of this you still don’t think you should invest in the proper modern fleet management tool, take some of these stats into account:
- Fleet safety systems can result in 22% fewer accidents
- Compliance admin tasks take 50% less time with a modern fleet management tool
- Fleet management tools can reduce insurance costs by 25%
- You can save up to 10% in fuel cost
- Your fleet will have 20% with the right fleet management tool
Now that we’ve painted you a picture by the numbers, find the right fleet management system for you sooner rather than later. Otherwise, you’ll be burning through money.
FAQ
Fleet management is the process of managing all of the physical and operational aspects of what your fleet needs to run smoothly.
Telematics is a monitoring process that uses GPS and OBD to track a vehicle’s geographic and internal status and working order remotely.
The fleet manager is the main point of contact for inquiries about the vehicle fleet and operations.
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