Why Fleet Owners Struggle With Cost and Efficiency Issues

“A fleet’s profitability depends on many factors, and a series of small, unmonitored inefficiencies can create a costly chain reaction for the business. Fleet owners face many such challenges every day, such as daily operational issues, unplanned repairs, excessive fuel consumption, poor driver behaviour, and inefficient routing. All these problems put a lot of financial burden on them, especially those who are still operating with traditional, manual systems. These outdated systems can never be time and cost-efficient. However, you can negate all these interconnected failures with an advanced fleet management system. It provides you with real-time data from vehicle telematics, diagnostics, and keeps an eye on driver behaviour, and much more. SpincLabs’ fleet management is the way to make fleet business cost and time-efficient.”

There are many issues that fleet owners have to face in day-to-day scenarios. These daily scenarios affect the fleet’s profitability and efficiency. A fleet’s profitability doesn’t die in a single explosion; it bleeds out in a thousand tiny, un-audited cuts. What does it mean? This means events such as unplanned repairs, engine failures, driver behaviour, fuel wastage, and similar inefficiencies burden them unnecessarily. These consistent problems are the reasons why fleet owners struggle with cost and fleet efficiency issues, especially if they are operating their fleets in a traditional way. They are bound to experience a chain reaction, where a seemingly minor inefficiency in one area causes costly consequences across the entire business. Hence, they need an advanced fleet management system to negate these interconnected failures so that their cost of ownership and ROI remain fruitful.

Inefficiencies and Issues They Face

Let’s see what the reasons are behind these cost and fleet efficiency issues and how SpincLabs’ advanced fleet management software can help fleet owners to overcome these inefficiencies.

Poor Vehicle Maintenance Practices

In traditional fleet management, maintenance creates certain inefficiencies for businesses. Since in traditional fleet management, vehicle maintenance relies on and is treated reactively, it is never cost efficient for businesses. Reactive maintenance means to solving issues when they occur. This means sudden vehicle breakdown causes higher costs for immediate repairs, lost productivity, rescheduled deliveries, and can never be time-efficient. Such unplanned downtime and poor vehicle maintenance cost your business.

Fleet Management System Solves It Through Predictive Maintenance

Advanced fleet management software negates all these issues through predictive maintenance. It gives you an early warning about each and every aspect of your vehicle if it identifies a certain maintenance issue. It keeps track of the engine’s onboard diagnostics and pre-schedules maintenance. This keeps your vehicle free from sudden breakdowns. 

1. Fleet management solution captures ‘Diagnostic Trouble Codes’ the moment they appear and alerts you even for a minor engine issue in real-time.
2. It automates maintenance reminders based on actual engine hours or kilometres driven. This ensures vehicles are serviced exactly when they need to be.
3. A fleet management system keeps track of vehicle health and performance. Hence, notifies you if it identifies issues timely.

Driver Safety and Behaviour

This aspect of fleet management is one of the biggest issues with traditional fleet businesses. As most of the large vehicle accidents happen due to driver behaviour. Also, poor driver behaviour aspects such as harsh braking, overspeeding, and too much idle time waste unnecessary fuel. Also, it compromises with fleet’s safety and efficiency. Fleet owners can never keep an eye on driver behaviour and are bound to face losses due to this. The traditional fleet management system isn’t efficient enough to keep track of driver behaviour. Hence, fleet owners tend to face higher fuel bills, lower fleet efficiency, and more frequent repairs.

Fleet Management System Keeps an Eye on it

SpincLabs’ smart fleet management solution helps you gain complete visibility for your fleet. It keeps track of driver behaviour and alerts you on aspects like overspeeding, harsh braking, drowsiness, idling times and other aspects through telematics, IoT sensors, real-time analytics and so on. Since it provides you with detailed reports on driver behaviour, you can identify inefficiencies and work on them to lower fuel consumption, cut down on vehicle wear and tear and also improve fleet efficiency.

1. Fleet management software provides objective scorecard for every driver. These scorecards are based on their safety points and other aspects. 
2. It alerts you in real-time for things like acceleration, hard cornering, and speeding and gives you all the metrics.
3. Fleet management solution provides detailed data so you can work on the improvements. You provide productive coaching sessions to drivers.

Inefficient Fuel and Route Management

Unnecessary detours, poor driving habits, congestion, idling at traffic lights, and poor trip planning all these aspects leach fuel and time. Even inflated tyres can waste a lot of fuel within an hour. These are invisible, untraceable losses that accumulate into bigger losses for fleet owners and their businesses. Traditional ways make your business inefficient, and hence, your business can’t achieve scalability you want it. You need advanced route optimization through advanced fleet management software that includes features like telematics, IoT sensors and real-time analytics. 

Fleet Management Software Analyzes It Smartly

Whether you own a big fleet or a small business, an intelligent fleet management system can identify the precise points of fuel waste and optimize routes for better expense management for small businesses and large enterprises. The system provides fleet owners with visibility and keeps their operations transparent. A fleet management solution doesn’t just report fuel usage; it overlays it with other data streams.

1. Fleet management software automates fuel consumption and provides detailed reports on it.
2. It shows you if a vehicle is idling, also precisely which driver, at what location, and for how long, it has been idling because unnecessary idling times lead to fuel wastage. 
3. It matches the kilometres driven on a route with the fuel consumed, frequency of smart fuel card usage, instantly highlighting any vehicle that is performing outside its expected efficiency baseline.
4. Fleet management solution cross-references fuel card transactions with the vehicle’s actual location and tank level data, flagging impossible fill-ups or suspicious activity in real-time.

Inefficient Manual Systems

No technology adoption means complicated processes and even more complicated operations. Even with new technologies, many fleet owners still rely on traditional ways of managing business operations. They have to work through manual fragmented systems, which means maintaining spreadsheets for expenses, paper logbooks for every process, and manual routing and dispatch. Hence, you spend hours a week just to maintain this data. Also, it creates possibilities of human errors in the data and manual effort that create the illusion of control, while actual visibility remains impossible.

Fleet Management Solution Automates Each Process 

Fleet management system collects all the data through vehicle telematics, driver behaviour monitoring, and maintenance schedules and shows you all within one unified dashboard. They negate the need for manual data-collection and provide detailed data for all fleet activities in real-time.

1. It collects, automates your data and digitizes it. This means it replaces manual, paper logs with automated ‘Electronic Logging Devices’. 
2. Automated data fusion negates the possibility of human errors.
3. FMS keeps all your fleet’s data encrypted and secure.
4. A fleet management system keeps historical data and also gives you real-time data for the entire operation. Hence, instead of spending hours to view last week’s paperwork, the fleet owners can see detailed points through unified dashboard.

Since the fleet businesses require logistical precision in a time-efficient manner, it becomes impossible for a traditional fleet management system to

achieve it. FMS can smoothen expense management for small businesses and provides them with logistical precision. SpincLabs’ intelligent fleet management software’s features help you negate all your cost and efficiency issues and make your business scalable.

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