Fleet Management in New York can be hard to handle. There are costs to control, trucks to repair and paint, and employees to keep safe and on-task. This creates little room for error. For fleet managers to remain on budget and keep their operation rolling they need to make their fleet more efficient.
Regularly addressing maintenance problems, managing costs of tire and fuel, lowering paperwork, and making use of new technology can help make fleet management in New York more effective.
Fleet maintenance schedule ensures that your services are in accordance with federal, state, and local laws. The roles and challenges of an operations manager seem endless, and a fleet management system can surely help make those tasks easier.
Even though having a fleet management solution doesn’t ensure that your daily operations will suddenly take less time than before, choosing the most effective fleet management system that is also the right fit for your business is more important.
Whether you handle a delivery business, or work in the industry of field service, managing your fleet is important for success to ensure you are keeping up with the needs and desires of your clients. Technology, information, and connectivity are coming together to create a belief in people that they can have what they want, when, where, and how they want it.
6 Tips to Improve Fleet Management in New York
To continue keeping up with the high demands of your customers, you need to have proper fleet management in New York. It demands business owners to plan and optimize routes taken by their vehicles, make changes at quick notice, track your vehicles and drivers, all while maintaining customer satisfaction. Below are tips to help fleet managers increase effectiveness and increase customer satisfaction while saving both time and money.
1. Have better route planning
Route optimization software can show you daily processes. It gets rid of the need to manually plan routes and can provide quick ROI for a business (greater than 30 percent). In addition to better planning your routes, it has additional benefits such as:
- Automated data reporting that gives details about the performance of a fleet, making it possible for you to make better decisions based on those metrics.
- Extended lifetime of your trucks and cheaper fuel costs by implementing better routes and lowering idling time.
- It saves office time because you will have the chance to plan in a short time, rather than in hours, and focus on other tasks.
To better comprehend the significance of investing in routing technology, it is important to understand just how much manual planning is costing fleet management in New York. Take time to consider the following projects that are wasting valuable time that could be invested elsewhere:
- Dealing with lengthy paperwork and files that could contain a lot of human error, such as, filling out paperwork manually, creating vital reports, typing addresses into a navigation system, or answering calls from the office
- Inability to properly manage requests or change routes in real-time (such as when there’s traffic, road closures, or on-demand requests)
- Lack of visibility into the location of your driver, making it hard to manage your day and nearly impossible to give customers dependable updates
2. Embrace Telematics
Fleet operations are benefiting from technology. Advances in telematics and GPS tracking provide more insight into the exact locations of your fleet, behavior of drivers, and general vehicle performance.
Telematics can also assist managers identify bad driving behaviors such as speeding, quick accelerating or braking, and idling. It also helps business owners identify road or traffic conditions to make it possible for drivers to be rerouted. This can help you not only improve driver safety and at the same time, cut down on fuel expenses.
This technology can also send alerts to fleet managers and drivers regarding potential issues with the vehicle. The technology can detect urgent issues, or identify problems that should be fixed during the next scheduled preventative maintenance service.
3. Move towards paperless modules
Why should you have more paperwork than needed? Filling out paper forms takes time and it creates room for mistakes. What happens if a technician incorrectly records his or her hours? What if a document gets missing? Going paperless and rather gaining access to data through a software solution will help improve the efficiency of the operation of your business.
Fleet management in New York can allow technicians to automatically allocate time to particular projects and have access to vital information regarding vehicles and equipment. Instead of looking for paperwork that has warranty information or vehicle history, a manager can access it through the software. The technician can record all details from the services carried out in real-time, making sure he or she does not forget to enter vital information later.
4. Analyze information to improve fleet performance
The best method of improving the performance of your fleet is to analyze data and detect where you are succeeding and where there is room for improvement. Using routing software with a large analytics dashboard will give you an idea of important metrics and allow you to make better decisions that will greatly improve the performance of your fleet. You’ll also be able to know which members of your team are not abiding by the plan, missing time-windows, or might require additional coaching and training:
- Use of the current resources of your fleet including average daily vehicles, vehicle usage by the load, planned distances, and unplanned time window violations
- Make changes to the execution of your routes and get a detailed look at time spent at other locations, route deviations, unplanned idle time, and delays
- Carefully monitor seasonality by looking back at how your fleet did during weekends or holidays to know if you were understaffed, if certain aspects resulted in problems, or if you need to adjust your plans
5. Take your fleet management systems mobile
Whether you are in your office or on the go, making use of routing software with a mobile app makes it possible for you to have an extra level of visibility into the activity of your fleet. Mobile apps offer huge benefits to drivers in the field, allowing them to gain access to their schedules and getting turn-by-turn directions, all without paper printouts or manual data entry. Installing mobility to your fleet will save you both time and money and make your business run more professionally.
Your mobile team can also make use of an app to record proof of delivery and send a customer photo, signature, text files, or audio notes that can be stored digitally for a long period.
By using a mobile app, you can get urgent information about the route execution to enable you to react accordingly. Accessing this type of visibility is important when it comes to unplanned occasions, such as a sick technician or vehicle problems.
6. Make use of GPS tracking
GPS tracking can be an important addition to the program of fleet management in New York. It can increase visibility into the whereabouts and behavior of a driver. By using GPS to monitor performance, managers can ensure that drivers are being productive, safe, and efficient. GPS technology enables fleet managers to:
- Get rid of blind spots on the locations of your drivers and view real-time activities
- Get an extra level of knowledge into the behavior of your drivers
- Improve internal communications by making it possible for drivers to record completed stops and driver locations
Be sure to continue visiting our blog to stay up to date with tips to improve fleet management in New York.