In any job profile, there will lot of challenges and tough situations will be there in the day-to-day work routine. This is a generalist statement. But the success people look at all the challenges as an opportunity to grow both in the professional and personal sphere.
As a fleet manager, one has to take care of the fleet productivity, focus on profitability and improve overall efficiency to take the logistics business forward.
In managing his work, the fleet manager faces numerous challenges to achieve efficient fleet management.
Here in this article, we will discuss in detail the various challenges faced by the fleet managers in managing the vehicles in the transportation and logistics sector.
Major Challenges faced by Fleet Managers in Fleet Management
The major role of a fleet manager is to improve the efficiency of all segments from vehicle management, driver management to handling customers, expenses management. But most of the fleet managers are occupied with manual tasks to assign trips to drivers, maintain excel sheets for expenses, and on regular phone calls with customers for vehicle updates.
Fleet Management Admin Tasks
Managing admin tasks in an organization, most of the fleet managers or fleet operators doesn’t even know this as a major challenge or this has an effect on fleet management.
According to the study report on average, more than 1 to 2 hours of daily work routine is spent on admin tasks such as quoting, raising invoicing, and other minor admin activities.
If the fleet manager is able to overcome this hurdle, he/she can spend quality time on improving the overall productivity of the fleet operations.
How to overcome this hurdle of admin tasks?
The major reason for this kind of challenge is maintaining the paperwork for such activities. If they adapt to technological advancement and digitize the work process, the majority of the time can be saved.
With the best fleet management software, the fleet manager can automate the process of raising the invoice, sharing quotations to customers, managing fleet expenses, driver lists, vehicle management, and overall admin in one common place, i.e fleet management system.
Fuel Consumption and Handling Fuel theft
Fuel expenses are around 25% of the overall logistics expenditure. Effective fuel management is another major challenge for fleet managers.
As a fleet manager, one needs to focus on fuel mileage, vehicle health, fuel consumption and finally keep an eye on fuel theft (at a time there may occur diesel theft from the truck fuel tank).
In fleet operations, if the fleet manager is able to effectively manage fuel expenditure leads to an overall 50% increase in vehicle production and efficiency.
How to manage fuel efficiency?
The best option to overcome this challenge the installing telematics technology on the entire fleet. Once the GPS Vehicle tracking device and fuel level sensors are installed on the vehicle the fleet managers can get the vital reports and data from the fleet management software.
The detailed data fleet manager gets from telematics software are:
- Truck Fuel consumption level
- Vehicle fuel mileage report
- Fuel theft alert
- Driver behavior monitoring
Using these reports and data, the fleet manager can improve fuel efficiency and guide the drivers to increase fuel milage without affecting the vehicle’s health.
To achieve this, the fleet operators should install the best fuel management system (one of the features of the fleet management system) for effective fleet fuel management.
Rising fleet vehicle maintenance costs
Healthy vehicle in the heart of the logistics business. To deliver the consignments, driver safety, customer retention to achieve this the fleet manager should properly maintain the vehicle.
This is the biggest challenge for the fleet manager as he/she should focus on many other factors in that fleet maintenance brings more workload.
Most of the fleet managers rely on their experience and expertise to schedule to the vehicle maintenance cycle. But this will not be the case for all, how to address this vehicle maintenance challenge in fleet operations?
To answer this question!
The solution is advanced fleet management software used in fleet maintenance. On using the software in fleet operations, the fleet manager will get detailed information regarding the vehicle vitals such as overspeeding, harsh driving, engine data, idling time and the list goes on from the telematics data.
Based on the data, the fleet manager can set the regular notification to schedule the vehicle for regular maintenance. The majority of the headache will be taken care of by the technology.
Dependence on Fleet Drivers for updates
In the logistics business, the fleet operators mostly depend on the drivers to get the estimated time of delivery (ETA). The ETA report is vital to the customers and the fleet manager is responsible to handle both customers and drivers.
In fleet managers work schedule majority of the time goes into handling the phone calls to get updates.
What is the best solution to get driver updates?
What if there is an ecosystem where the driver regularly updates all the vital information needed by customers from reaching loading point, loading started, and unloading is done, vehicle location from Universal driver app?
Yes in the market, there is such fleet management ecosystems to improve the fleet management process to simplify the manual workload of fleet managers.
Expenses Management
Finally, the next biggest challenge faced by fleet managers is expenses management.
To overcome the age-old ledger books and banking software, fleet operators should adapt to the evolving fleet management software that provide expenses as one of the prime features for fleet operations.
Why you need to digitize the fleet management process
Digitization improves the maintenance of the records, streamlines the process, easily accessible data, need not rely on one person or expertise.
As the technology develops the organization should ready to accept the change and adapt to the recent developments for the betterment of the future.
How Fleet Management Software helps in Fleet operations
Fleet management software, like vamosys.com, is like a CRM tool used for marketing activities. One software application used to manage the entire sales and marketing process of the organization. In the same way, the fleet management software helps to improve the work process and integrates all the stakeholders involved in the fleet operations.
It is always better to move forward than to be stagnant in one place. If you are the fleet manager and facing a similar issue, then the time has arrived to adapt to the changing needs of the market.
