Delivery fleets around the globe are witnessing a proliferated demand due to the rise of e-commerce. With immense competition in the market, it becomes crucial that you stay updated with the latest practices.
You need to ensure that your business has a proficient delivery fleet management strategy for you to increase vehicle uptime, review productivity and elevate your profitability.
The Need for Effective Delivery Fleet Management
E-commerce has changed the way our society now makes purchases. Rather than going to stores, most people prefer buying online and relying on various delivery fleets to deliver their orders.
A comprehensive fleet management software empowers you to track every aspect of your fleet, be it maintenance, inspections, vehicle performance, or total cost of ownership (TCO).
Best Practices To Maintain Effective Delivery Fleet Management
Here are mentioned some delivery fleet management practices that can help you improve the ways you track your assets on the road –
- Vehicle Monitoring
As a delivery fleet manager, it is your prime responsibility to monitor vehicles to ensure drivers stick to their routes and complete deliveries on time.
While tracking your delivery fleet helps you ensure driver productivity, it also notifies you of any issues that surface when drivers are en route.
Most delivery fleets implement a vehicle tracking system, either a GPS or a telematics tool, to obtain efficient routes and keep an eye on vehicle location.
Despite installing such innovative tools, the notion of keeping track of your fleet operations is not merely limited to that.
Using a Telematics system but with other obsolete management methods in your firm, like paper processes or whiteboards won’t provide comprehensive visibility into your fleet’s day-to-day operations.
To optimize your overall delivery fleet management process, you need to have all real-time fleet data at a central location.
You can achieve complete fleet visibility by centralizing your entire fleet’s data using a fleet management software.
Not only can you view your vehicle location and manage driver assignments, but also pair your existing GPS or telematics tools with fleet management software.
This way, you can augment your data and enhance your fleet management process through –
- Automating odometer updates that would trigger maintenance reminders.
- Tracking vehicle location to alert managers to fuel location discrepancies.
- Alerting managers to diagnostic trouble codes (DTC) as-well-as engine fault alerts.
Alongside general vehicle location tracking, the data retrieved from your fleet telematics tool can facilitate streamline fleet processes and initiate maintenance strategies every time issues arise.
Comprehensively monitoring your fleet using fleet management software empowers you to proactively handle your fleet.
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- Improve Driver Productivity
The success of your fleet is highly dependent on your drivers. Ensuring driver productivity and safety must be your priority.
Elevating your fleet’s efficiency begins by establishing clear expectations for your drivers and maintaining open lines of communication.
Since your drivers are constantly on the road, you must have a mobile-first platform to better communicate with your team.
By employing a native mobile app, drivers can deliver real-time information regarding vehicle inspections, maintenance needs or even task statuses throughout the day.
Monitoring your drivers is arguably the best way to achieve constant visibility into your fleet’s health and performance and provide drivers with the support they demand.
- Sustainable Preventive Maintenance Program
Delivery fleet management is all about adhering to tight schedules as-well-as the ability to view the big picture when it comes down to fleet upkeep and performance.
With profuse orders to fulfill every day, your fleet can’t afford unprecedented downtime or have vehicles out of service for too long.
To maximize uptime and proficiently manage your fleet’s maintenance needs, you need to implement a schedule for preventive maintenance.
However, fleets who still employ paper and spreadsheets to manage fleet maintenance cannot keep up with basic preventive maintenance tasks, resulting in increased downtime and expensive repairs.
With delivery fleet management software, it becomes convenient for fleet managers to configure preventive maintenance schedules that often work to your busy routes.
Having prior notice of upcoming preventive maintenance tasks helps you ensure that you can schedule service while your team enjoys their off-hours to avoid schedule conflicts.
Rather than trying to push maintenance tasks in during a driver’s shift, service can be executed prior to or after their route to steer clear of bottlenecks in the delivery process.
- Monitor Fuel Expenses and Consumption
Fuel is undeniably one of the biggest ongoing costs for any fleet, especially for delivery fleets. Due to the size of your vehicles as-well-as the time passed idling during stops, regulating fuel economy might be challenging.
Your fleet might already be leveraging fuel cards within your delivery fleet management plan.
Fleet fuel cards can help streamline fuel purchases for your drivers and provide insights into a huge amount of data for your operations.
Integrating your fuel cards to fleet management software renders increased visibility into fuel consumption and also expense data.
By using robust management software, you can conveniently view and track fuel metrics that include –
- Cost-per-mile
- Number of units (gallons/liters)
- Vendor locations
- Fuel economy
- Fuel grade
- Consumption trends
Reviewing your fuel data with other fleet information, such as maintenance trends or fleet expenses enables you to extrapolate areas of improvement and develop strategies to mitigate fuel expenses.
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- Calculate Cost of Ownership
Delivery fleets are known to have high operating costs. Unlike any other fleets, your vehicles are always in constant use and rack up a lot of miles.
Meticulously monitoring your fleet’s entire cost of ownership is necessary if you intend to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and eliminate unnecessary spending.
Tracking costs can be tedious for fleet managers who use obsolete fleet management methods. Sorting through spreadsheets and tackling with numbers is a headache, and leads to errored calculations.
Handling your entire fleet operation on a single, cloud-based software empowers you to monitor real-time expense data and also review every investment down to the line item.
Having this magnitude of visibility into your fleet’s expenses can help you trim the fat across your budget, execute better purchasing decisions and efficiently allocate money for future expenses.
Final Words
Delivery fleet management software helps you calculate your fleet’s total cost of ownership in real-time. Fleet managers can view the latest expense reports and share the retrieved data with stakeholders.
With delivery fleet vehicles constantly on the road, you need to follow the above-mentioned practices to ensure a streamlined workflow and ease-of-access to your entire fleet vehicles with the right software.