If you have managed your fleet, you already know how tedious it can be. Along with the stress comes cost management. You never know when can your pocket feel light with the heavy expenses. But how can you decrease fleet operating prices?
Prepare a list of your expenses for the last month and analyze the unnecessary costs. Now think of how can you prevent them. Try to keep the expenses in your budget. Here is the 4-step ultimate guide to decrease the fleet operating prices.
Is it fuel costing you highly?
Fleet managers talking about maintenance can never forget fuel in the costs. Because it is something eating up the most budget. Is there any way of getting rid of the fuel costs? Yes, shift to electric cars. But, I wish it was very easy. Well, there are still some ways in which you can keep a check on fuel costs.
This is one of the ways of decreasing fleet operating costs.
- One approach is to keep an eye on what happens after vehicles are completely fueled up. Ask your drivers to not take long or unnecessary routes or let the engine be on even for no movement. This will not only consume your fuel more but also depreciation its efficiency.
Prevention way- Use tech integrations like telematics devices and GPS in fleet management software. This will help you in monitoring the vehicle’s idle time and check paths chosen, so you can save the dollars in your pocket. This might seem a small step, but thousands of small steps can result in saving one large fuel price.
- Identify the fuel efficiency and economies of the individual vehicle. If you find that the fuel expenses and prices for that specific vehicle are running higher than expected, this might be a red flag for the driver’s behavioral mistake or the need for potential maintenance. This might be affecting your fuel efficiency in the long term. Discuss these issues and try to convert these red flags into green flags.
- To check your pocket for the fuel costs, make a count of how much it is spent at the gas station. You can use fuel cards to keep a record of fuel purchased by each driver. If you are storing and using data from fuel cards, make sure it is encrypted to protect it from being stolen.
- If you use fleet management software to manage your vehicles, you can integrate fuel cards with it. This will help you in using the data in maintaining important metrics like the vehicle’s fuel expenditure and cost per mile. This will also reduce the stress of drivers logging receipts since you will get this info and decrease fleet operating prices.
Include the total cost of ownership in your budget
Overall repair, fuel, and maintenance costs get the hype but what is left is adding the cost of ownership in the budget. Though the cost factors keep varying with time, it is a good practice to keep a record of the price of running your fleet and note down all the variables that participate in the cost of operating the fleet.
Observing TCO thresholds helps you in monitoring: when your vehicle surpassed its surviving time so that you can take the correct measures to make money and thus decrease fleet operating prices.
Using fleet management software with some integrations. can help you in maintaining all fleet operation costs in a single place to measure various metrics like cost per mile, fuel expense, and total operating prices per month without manual input.
Prepare a maintenance schedule
What do maintenance costs mostly include?
- Vehicle repair in case of damage.
- Servicing charges,
- Missed warranty dates,
- Tow trucks,
- Vehicle replacement when needed
- Cost of roadside mishap prevention through insurance
All these give you a huge maintenance bill. To prevent this fleet operating cost, follow a maintenance schedule for your fleet. Include unforeseen vehicle repair and roadside mishaps in it. With this preventive measure, your vehicles will be available for service, either by mileage or age, regularly without missed dates. Thus, all your vehicle’s health will be up to the mark and it will also prevent expensive and unforeseen expenditure.
What more can you do to prevent this?
- Keep consistency in regular service and maintenance.
- eDVIRs(electronic driver vehicle inspection reports).
This will help you in keeping your vehicles in good condition on daily basis.
The best thing about eDVIRs is that they can be done on both phones and tablets and will help your drivers in being compliant with FMCSA rules over the road.
If you are integrated with good fleet management software, they already offer you fleet management schedules for all specific vehicle types and send you service reminders, so you know the time schedule time of your vehicle service.
Some softwares also offer maintenance integrations so you get access to see and approve these service requests. This will keep technicians, drivers, and managers about all repair information. It also allows fleet managers to the problems so that they can allocate assets, time, and technicians to solve them.
Take care of vehicle’s and driver’s safety
Do you know what happens in an overall road accident?
- Insurance premium rises,
- Road rules and regulations come into role,
- Huge repair prices,
- Or an important replacement.
The best way to decrease fleet operating prices due to unforeseen conditions is to prevent road accidents and vehicle loss.
It's not just about vehicles but drivers as well. In all this chaos, ensure that your drivers are safe while inspiring them to maintain consistent DVIRs. Remember prevention is always better than cure so consider an approach that prevents accidents before occurring.
GPS devices along with monitoring routes also give you an insight into driver behavior as well. Some unprotective driving behaviors include harsh braking, very high-speed driving, not following traffic rules, etc. which will affect your vehicle’s health as well as hampers driver’s safety. Thus, maintenance is important to save you bugs.
Follow this guide to decrease fleet operating prices
The earlier you implement these methods in your fleet management, the more quickly you can reduce the expenses. This 4-step ultimate guide is an experience-based guide that will help you in saving your pockets.
If you have any queries, doubts, or requests, do not hesitate to email them at info@securefleetmanager.com. For more updates, deals, tips, and hacks about the fleet management systems follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Thank you for staying here with us. do you wish to read from us.