Top 7 Common Challenges in Fleet Management
With the ever-increasing complexity of fleet management, rising costs for new vehicles, and new regulations, fleet managers face a hard time trying to handle new challenges with legacy solutions and practices. In many cases, such an approach leads to information overload, losing essential data, human error, and burnout. Below we go more in detail about the most common challenges in fleet management and available solutions which can help fleet managers address those challenges, make better decisions and stay more effective.
New Vehicle Acquisition
Vehicle acquisition is one of the top priorities for any fleet manager for many reasons. It is always one of the most serious investments for any company, given the price of new vehicles, so fleet managers always have to address it most closely. They have to analyze massive volumes of data, including vehicle prices, fuel consumption, cost of repairs, residual value, and many other details gathered from dealers and other sources, to make the best decisions and calculate the cost of ownership.
Fuel Management
Fuel management is probably the second most important aspect after choosing a new vehicle as it has a significant impact on the overall cost of fleet operation. Fleet managers must keep a close eye on mileage vs fuel consumption for each of their vehicles to spot problems related to the vehicle itself, drivers’ style of driving and other factors.
Vehicle Maintenance and Repairs
All vehicles need regular maintenance and timely addressing smaller technical issues to avoid major repairs. Fleet managers have to know exactly the mileage for each of their vehicles and plan maintenance in advance to strictly observe mileage intervals.
Managing Drivers
Fleet managers oversee drivers, control their usage of vehicles, fuel consumption, and enforce company policies, including rules for safe driving, insurance requirements and other terms. Many fleet managers are assisted with GPS driving monitoring systems, collecting data about each vehicle and providing a bird’s eye view of their fleet.
Cost Control
Fleet management involves multiple costs related to fuel, maintenance, tires, insurance, and numerous other services needed to have all the vehicles up and running. Still, fleet managers have to stay on budget and keep the fleet operating without exceeding the cost limits. It takes careful planning and keeping all the smallest costs on record to avoid them from snowballing and getting out of control.
Compliance with New Regulations
With new regulations coming all the time, fleet managers must stay abreast of the compliance requirements while ensuring that all requirements are accounted for. Fleet managers have to comply with GDRP requirements when storing driver’s data, observe the requirements for data accountability and transparency and comply with other terms. Most of it would be impossible when data are kept in spreadsheets, putting company information at risk of loss while creating compliance issues.
Data Management
As it can be seen from above, fleet operation generates huge volumes of data which should be regularly updated, configured into various reports and exchanged between the departments in real-time. When working with these massive datasets, fleet managers desperately need effective software which would become a single source of truth about the company fleet by storing all data in the cloud, accessible from any device by various users, and offering various auto-populated templates and reports.
Contact JAT Fleet to Get Getter Tools to Address These Challenges
JAT Fleet software is designed with fleet managers in mind by addressing the most common challenges for fleet management, including fuel management, cost of ownership calculations, events monitoring, maintenance planning, GPS tracking, and much more. For more information, don’t hesitate to request a free demo to learn more about how technology can help you move your fleet management to the next level.