Fleet management refers to the processes that fleet managers employee to manage all fleet and asset information, starting from acquisition all the way through to disposal. Fleet Management helps companies reduce costs, boost efficiency, and ensure compliance throughout the operation of an entire fleet. Here is a beginners guide to fleet management.
What Are The Duties And Responsibilities Of A Fleet Manager?
- A fleet manager needs to maintain electronic databases that consist of sales, registration, and inspection. The manager also needs to ensure the maintenance of fleet management.
- A fleet manager needs to be able to address all requests through scheduling, forecasting, and surveying current user trends.
- The maintenance of knowledge and the utilization of all fleet information and user surveys need to be done to forecast new requirements.
- The manager has to arrange fleets and fleet operational staff to provide support and take care of special event planning.
- Performing vehicle registration, insurance, CHP formalities, and documentation that includes induction of new vehicles is another responsibility of the fleet manager.
- Fleet managers also monitor routine and ad hoc maintenance, obtain tags for new vehicles, and renew the old tags to ensure optimal schedule fleet management.
- Monitoring and ensuring fleet operation as per the local and state laws is another responsibility of fleet managers.
- They maintain and monitor the data management system to organize fleets as per various schedules and requests efficiently.
Challenges that Fleet Managers Face
Fuel Management
Fuel management seems to be one of the most challenging tasks for a fleet manager, given the ever-increasing hike in fuel prices. With the right tools and strategies, you can control your fleet fuel expenses effectively, significantly reducing this operational cost
Health and safety
A fleet manager is responsible for the fleet’s health and safety. On the off-chance that the driver has an accident, the fleet manager is responsible for making sure reporting procedures are put in place and implemented. These procedures need to be in place to help drivers deal with accidents by following up on their insurance and getting their claims without hassle.
Driver Productivity
Fleet managers have to ensure their drivers’ productivity. They have the responsibility of making sure there is no wastage of time by creating a route plan for route optimization.
Fleet Management Software
Fleet management software or Fleet software allows fleet managers to obtain and keep information relevant to the performance of their fleet without hassle.
It is fundamentally a complex database with many applications that allow the recording and reporting of essential attributes that may help boost efficiency and cut costs.
Fleet software is known to improve performance, bring down costs, and provide compliance with government regulations.
Functions of Fleet Software
Here are the primary tasks of a fleet software:
Vehicle maintenance
Vehicle maintenance has to be done to meet contractual obligations on leased vehicles or to preserve warranties. Most heavy vehicle drivers check their vehicles before they start a trip, but car drivers seldom do so.
There must be reminders for a change of tyres and fluids. It needs to load and export the receipts for vehicle expenses.
Managing Drivers and Licensing
Drivers must have a valid license for the vehicle they are using. Aside from this, a company needs to know when a driver’s license or license endorsements are going to expire, and other details such as if the driver has received demerit points or a suspension or disqualification, or anything else of that sort. Reminders for eyesight and medical checks are also a part of driver management.
Data Extraction from Vehicle
Several vehicles employ a standard Fleet Management System (FMS) interface that transfers a considerable amount of data about what the vehicle is doing when the other systems are using their proprietary hardware. Examples of data measured include:
- Vehicle speed
- Gear and clutch operation
- Distance of journey
- Engine fluids
- Use of seatbelts
Infringement and Insurance management
Drivers are known to get speeding tickets, toll notices, and other infringements occasionally. Fleet software must be able to allocate these to the drivers correctly and make sure they are resolved.
Fleet software must also take care of the insurance for the entire vehicle fleet. This includes vehicle disposal, level of risk, types, the number of vehicles, and so forth.
Asset Tracking
Data can also be entered manually into a centralized asset register. Keep in mind that this register must offer fully-customizable fields to keep a record of valuable asset data. Organizations usually do asset tracking to further the usage of security of valuable items.
Benefits of Asset Tracking
Here are a few intriguing uses of using asset tracking solutions :-
- Improvement in efficiency and reduced costs
- Easy and quick determination of assets in real-time, at any point
- Considerable decrease in administrative costs because administrators do not need to track or locate assets manually manually
- Tracking and reduction of asset losses and more effective utilization of assets
- Increase in efficiency and better indexing of your company’s physical space by segregating the items that are accessed together, thereby creating a robust structure of your physical system
- Improvement in customer service due to better asset tracking and management practices
Barcodes are typically used for data collection and asset tracking. They give each asset a unique identifier to ensure they are individually recognized and tracked. Barcodes include business-critical information, examples of which are project name, asset category, and so forth. Barcode scanners read every barcode and allow organizations to count their assets faster and with greater accuracy while eliminating human error.