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The Fleet Manager Viewpoints - Service | Efficiency | Accurate Data

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Rosalie Wolters
The Fleet Manager Viewpoints - Service | Efficiency | Accurate Data

Fleet managers play a pivotal role in any transportation or logistics company when it comes to selecting and maintaining vehicles and keeping up with delivery and distribution schedule.
They are always on the lookout to improve efficiency, productivity, and reduce their overall staff and transportation costs. 

A fleet manager has many of the same responsibilities as any other manager–maintaining the health and safety of the work environment, managing employees, and ensure that the productivity of the company spikes annually.

If you manage a fleet and your goal is to improve any aspect of your operation, here is where you need to start with:

  • How many miles/day does your fleet run?
  • What is your average service time per delivery?
  •  How many deliveries/day per driver?
  •  What is your team’s on-time percentage?
  • What do each driver’s performance numbers show?

The challenge is that many fleet operations teams don’t have complete data; they have a piece of information, for instance: total fleet miles, total driver hours, and perhaps an estimated service time that they use for general planning purposes. Most managers are critically aware of what they don’t have. But due to the absence of required staff, budget or technology, teams they instead rely on incomplete data and intuition to fill the gaps and build complex route plans. Without proper data, teams fail to draw conclusions as to what’s working and what’s not and miss on the opportunities for improvement.

Logistics transformation today has led to solutions that make your process efficient and help your organization lead the industry if leveraged appropriately. Investing in a transport management solution such as a Fleet Management System, a system that allows for tracking a large number of a vehicle’s data: speed, temperature, engine block, fuel level, door opening, geographical location, route direction, and more can make your data collection process much efficient.

Received from a vehicle’s sensors, this data is displayed to the manager who can track all their vehicles in real-time, determine when they’ll get to the destination, and how well the vehicles are handled by the drivers.

In fleet manager's(ideal) work, they often find that the first order of business is to collect an accurate and comprehensive baseline of fleet data. This is essential for creating a complete picture of how a fleet is really working. Along the way, most companies find:

  • Planned vs. actual routes aren’t what they had expected, either in terms of extra miles, on-time deliveries, or time-on-site during deliveries
  • Driver’s performance isn’t uniform across the fleet, which is attributable to a variety of factors, including the route distance and stops, the size of customers on the route, geography around customer location (e.g., urban vs. suburban), and driver experience or expertise
  • Customer performance is often uneven, with some customers keeping drivers on-site much longer than expected
  • Fleet performance drops when new drivers are added, due to the increase in service times or other delays, which may frustrate customers

But, 

With comprehensive fleet data, companies fleet managers can:

  • Set fleet performance goals and assess progress over time
  • Optimize route plans based on accurate service-time information for each location
  • Improve driver on-boarding, with sensitivity to customers that may be high risk due to service-level interruptions/change
  • Identify coaching opportunities for drivers, based on data about route execution
     

With an ever-expanding appreciation for the complexities and opportunities presented by the last mile, combined with a relentless focus on meeting customer commitments, accurate data is a baseline requirement for teams that want to compete successfully. After all, your customers evaluate the capability of your fleet on your ability to rapidly meet their needs; you need a peek for understanding how you deliver, and data is the window to it.

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Rosalie Wolters
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