Fleet Management Challenges: How Technology Can Help

Fleet managers play a key role in selecting and maintaining vehicles, keeping up with the delivery schedules, and minimizing the risk associated with vehicle investment. It also includes managing fuel expenses and ensuring drivers have the right equipment to fulfill tasks.

To keep up with these challenges, organizations need to leverage the best available technology to increase visibility and automation in their fleet operations.

Let’s look at some stats to understand the impact of technology in improving fleet operations:

• The use of GPS-based fleet tracking by organizations has increased by 8.5% from last year.
• With an increase in technology adoption in fleet operations in 2020, 32% of companies reported a positive ROI within the first six months.
• 42% of companies reported fewer safety incidents after using fleet tracking software, and 54% reported improved customer service.

As the stats mentioned above present, the use of technology has immensely benefited fleet management operations. Now, let’s look at some of the most prominent challenges in this industry and how technology provides an effective solution. 

7 Fleet Management Challenges & Solutions

1. Fleet Maintenance and Asset Utilization

Fleet maintenance is one of the most critical challenges for a fleet manager to ensure optimized deliveries. Since fleet maintenance costs can be very high for small fleet owners, creating a regular maintenance schedule helps fix most problems proactively.

Using effective fleet tracking software, fleet managers can easily monitor maintenance requirements while saving time and effort. It also gives a clear view over time of the asset utilization trends that can help you manage your assets efficiently.

2. Ensuring Fuel Efficiency

Fuel costs are one of the major costs for a business that runs a fleet. With the fluctuating international crude oil prices and increase in fuel levies, it becomes difficult for companies to optimize their performance and generate ROI.

A fleet management solution with route optimization capability can help a business contract fewer vehicles while maintaining optimum productivity. With fewer vehicles, you will need fewer drivers, which translates into lesser expenditure and maintenance costs, helping your company achieve positive business growth within a limited budget.

3. Gain visibility

GPS tracking enables you to gain visibility across your fleet throughout the journey. By tracking the location of your vehicles, you can check whether your drivers are following the correct route and remaining productive.

It is also an excellent tool to check all the available drivers in the area and allocate the delivery to the driver nearest to the location during the last-mile delivery operation.

4. Minimizing Human Errors

High customer demands for fast shipping and shorter delivery windows have resulted in unrealistic ETAs, delays, and an increase in incorrect deliveries—affecting a company’s bottom line in the longer run.

While manual route planning is inefficient and cumbersome, a sophisticated route planning solution can take in factors like route length, service times, traffic patterns, and more to devise an effective route for each delivery agent.

5. Managing road conditions

Inadequate road and traffic conditions can cause unnecessary delays and fuel wastage, resulting in higher operational costs and lower efficiency. The impact is more significant in longer routes where dynamic road and traffic conditions can affect the reputation of a business, resulting in poor customer retention.

A dynamic routing system can ensure timely deliveries across the region while also increasing fleet productivity and efficiency. It also provides:

• Optimized routes to minimize delays with accurate ETAs
• Real-time notifications to help fleet managers and customers get a precise status of a particular delivery

6. Automate Data Entry and Reporting

A fleet management software can instantly pull in data and automatically calculate expenses to determine ownership costs on a per-vehicle basis. It also allows you to organize and visualize metrics in a digestible manner.

An effective reporting solution allows you to generate detailed reports in a few clicks by combining all your metrics, enabling you to easily analyze and share the results with other stakeholders. 

7. Improve Communication to Avoid Bottlenecks

With the onset of COVID-19, the concept of remote work has come to the forefront, with many fleet managers having to manage their fleets remotely. 

Fleet managers face increased challenges to ensure transparency and visibility in fleet operations. With efficient fleet management software, you can dynamically communicate with your teams and constructively resolve any issues.

Apart from that, it also enables your fleet to upload information instantaneously from anywhere to improve the workflow. 

The NetworkON Advantage

Technology has incremented a large-scale change in the fleet industry with the digitization of fleet operations. By using a fleet management solution like NetworkON, managers can enhance the performance of their fleets and increase customer retention. 

NetworkON offers a comprehensive fleet management solution with accurate scheduling, efficient utilization of resources, and the capability to manage every process from a single dashboard. 

Fleet providers can integrate our software solution and benefit from seamlessly handling assignments, tracking your vehicles in real-time, and making better decisions with accurate performance metrics. 

To know how our cloud-based fleet management solution can help your business increase its productivity and efficiency, connect at info@networkon.ion or visit our website.