Why is Fleet Management necessary in today’s economy?
Fleet Management ensures greater productivity of fleet operations while also reducing costs. Commercial fleet management involves monitoring fuel consumption, vehicle health, route optimization, and fleet-related expenses including parking, tolls, insurance and more. There are a number of challenges faced by fleet managers. A study reveals that efficient fleet management lowers accident costs by 16-30%, fuel by 7-20% & labour by 9-25% (Source: Verizon Connect).
Who are Fleet Managers and what is their primary role?
Fleet operations managers, as the name suggests, manage a company’s vehicles or their own commercial vehicles to ensure a seamless delivery of shipments. Challenges in commercial fleet management involves maintaining the day-to-day operations of the fleet including vehicle acquisition, assigning vehicles to drivers, monitoring driving patterns, increasing fuel efficiency, setting maintenance schedules, tracking fleet metrics and ensuring legal compliance.
What are the 4 biggest Challenges faced by Fleet Managers?
- Administrative tasks: Fleet Managers spend most of their time on administrative tasks such as invoicing. According to TomTom’s global study, 49% of fleet managers spend an average of 1.5 – 2 hours per week on invoicing and verifying transactions.
- Lack of visibility: Fleet managers cannot communicate or monitor truck drivers due to lack of visibility and it leads to lower productivity. Moreover, lack of visibility into proper routes can cause delayed delivery of goods or might even lead to accidents.
- Fleet Maintenance: Fleet Managers should ensure that thetrucks are scheduled for regular maintenance to prevent the restriction of certain functions over time, resulting in wear and tear costs and to avoid accidents.
- Multiple Expenses: Fleet managers struggle with multiple expenses and a lot of receipts to handle manually. A recent survey reveals that 44% of fleets rated increasing costs as a top challenge to daily fleet operations.
How Technology Can Help overcome the challenges faced by Fleet Managers?
The integration of technology in everyday fleet operations help to ease the challenges and provide relevant solutions for commercial fleet management. Let’s take a look at the most widely used technological solutions!
- Invoice payment systems: By using an invoice payment management system, fleet managers can streamline payments, and ensure uninterrupted cash flow. Moreover, they can have easy access to transaction history, without any mistakes, paperwork, or the need for third parties.
- Fleet tracking systems: Fleet tracking systems provide real-time tracking for commercial vehicles to ensure greater visibility, productivity and safety. It involves route optimisation, predictive maintenance alerts and monitoring driver behaviour to reduce distractions while driving, reduce idle time and improve fuel efficiency.
- Integrated fleet cards: Fleet managers can use integrated fuel and fleet management cards to get discounts on fuel purchases and to unify fleet-related expenses including tolls, parking, maintenance and more. Moreover, they can prevent theft or fraud with cashless payments and notifications.
Let’s Wrap Up!
Commercial fleet management is a tedious process that fleet operations managers undertake to ensure a seamless flow of goods and services between shippers and customers. There are a number of challenges faced by fleet managers including administrative tasks, lack of visibility, fleet maintenance and multiple expense management.
However, these challenges can be overcome by fleet management services provided by fintech companies like invoice payment systems, fleet tracking systems and integrated fleet cards for seamless operations and payments. Axlerate is a fintech platform for the logistics ecosystem to monitor and manage fleet operations and payments.
