Whatever the size of your business, it is quite possible that vehicles are a crucial part of it. For many small to medium enterprises, a vehicle is the lifeblood of the business and everything revolves around them being on the road. For a larger business, perhaps involved in logistics, vehicles are everything. But regardless of the size of your organisation, vehicles also represent a huge cost.
Running a fleet of vehicles can be very expensive, but many businesses can’t afford to have a dedicated fleet manager, or don’t even recognise that having one would save the business a lot of money. There are many costs which fleet management needs to balance, and so these need managing properly. These include vehicle service and maintenance, the efficiency of operations in terms of fuel, driving and work patterns and compliance – such as licensing, insurance, tax, accident management etc.
If your business cannot justify a dedicated fleet management position, why not look at outsourcing the fleet management role? This effectively hands the reins over to the experts and enables people in the business to concentrate on their own areas of expertise. But what are the various benefits of this?
Technical knowledge
Managing fleet costs now involves significant data analysis. There are many software packages available which can be used to track vehicles, plan journeys, programme deliveries/collections efficiently, track driver behaviour and manage fuel usage and re-filling. This is a huge opportunity to identify areas where you can reduce costs, but it can take a lot of time to study this data, see patterns and make decisions. It also requires some expertise in using and analysing the data. Software also exists which can improve communicationsand job planning. So let the experts do it and cut half the time and cost from the exercise.
Understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO)
The cost of running a vehicle is not simply the lease cost the company pays, it includes the whole lifetime cost, so service & maintenance, fuel and consumables (tyres, wipers, lights). So effective fleet management helps to maximise this TCO and ensures the business is getting the most value possible out of its vehicles. Techniques to do this include managing fuel in order to drive more efficiently and preventive maintenance. If you plan regular maintenance of your vehicles you can avoid costly repairs and minimise downtime where vehicles are inoperative.
Researching alternative fuels
It may be that petrol and diesel vehicles are still ideal for your business, based on your mileage, your type of driving and the type of vehicles you need to run. However, a dedicated fleet manager can properly research and analyse this, putting together a proper justification report covering all the alternatives, such as full electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles and hydrogen vehicles. With benefits such as low-emission zones, tax breaks and the cheaper costs of running cleaner fuels, there are genuine motivations for transitioning to alternative fuels, but it has to be done at the right time and a fleet manager can help you identify when that is.
Service & maintenance
Managing the service and maintenance of a large fleet can be a full-time job. You need to programme a schedule of service visits for all your vehicles, while ensuring you still have enough coverage out on the road. This also requires balancing downtime for repairs and monitoring the lifetime cost-effectiveness of vehicles, ie. when it might become time to write them off and upgrade to new vehicles.
Driver safety
As an employer, you have a duty of care to your drivers and this is closely connected to service and maintenance and ensuring vehicles are safe to drive, but also involves training and compliance. Poor vehicle safety can lead to accidents, insurance costs and vehicle downtime so is a potentially very costly area which requires expert management.
Leasing expertise
Where a business needs different types of vehicles for different tasks, ie. for transporting people, equipment, materials, for short journeys or for long motorway journeys, it can be very challenging to find the best vehicles in terms of performance, practicality and factors like fuel efficiency and emissions. After that there is also the skill involved in finding the best deals costs-wise. A dedicated fleet manager should have expertise in this field, and if you partnered with Total Motion, for example, we have long-established links with car leasing companies and service & maintenance businesses. So we are able to access some of the best value deals available and pass these onto the customer. Without this industry knowledge and experience, vehicle leasing can be much more costly.
In a small to medium business it can be hard to justify a dedicated resource for fleet management, so outsourcing this discipline to an expert supplier such as Total Motion makes sense on many levels, and will ultimately lead to great improvements for the business and savings on the bottom line, so to learn more about what Total Motion can do for
