August 20, 2024
Sara Davies
Articles
The right fleet management strategy is key to increasing productivity while controlling costs across your fleet. We’ve rounded up the 5 fleet management practices that successful fleet managers tend to focus on.
5 Practices of the Best Fleet Managers
1. Prioritise Proactive Maintenance
Waiting until a vehicle fails or breaks down is neither safe, nor time efficient. Regularly monitoring the condition of vehicles through servicing and driver checks helps increase the likelihood of minor faults being picked up before they escalate into major issues.
While preventative maintenance requires expenditure, long-term cost efficiency is gained when the fleet is spared expensive repairs further down the line.
Wessex Fleet offer a fully managed maintenance service, regardless of whether your fleet is supplied through us. Our service can include:
- Regular online driver checks
- A complete fleet audit trail
- 24 hour driver assistance
- Immediate access to the best repair centres
- Fully outsourced responsibility
- Vehicle collection plus servicing and returns
- Fully online easy bookings
- Highly competitive pricing
In addition, we offer fully managed:
Vehicle MOTs
If you have older fleet vehicles that require servicing, we can keep a track of the MOT dates for every vehicle in your fleet and ensure that they get through their MOT testing and any necessary repairs are completed.
Driver VMCs
We can also help train and manage your drivers’ vehicle maintenance checks by offering a system for drivers to complete regular and thorough checks of their vehicle.
Accident Management
Our full accident management and breakdown assistance service operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Find out more here.
Vehicle Telematics
Telematics technologies can also be deployed, allowing fleet managers to proactively capture a wide range of fleet data, including fault codes.
2. Develop Your Fleet Management Policy
Set attainable goals, key performance metrics, and deadlines. This will help you determine your budget, management, and cost reduction strategies.
At Wessex Fleet, we create bespoke fleet management policies for our customers, to provide a fleet management service geared towards specific business requirements.
We begin with a full fleet audit to determine an organisation’s needs, the current fleet and the future direction to create a fleet solution that achieves goals through implementation.
The next step is managing the fleet administration process effectively. A Fleet Management service such as Wessex Fleet can ensure that all the administrative tasks are managed in one place for you. Find out more here.
Once you have prepared protocols for various fleet management aspects, such as vehicle maintenance and adherence to transport regulations, you need to communicate these to your management team and employees, ensuring support and integration of the policies is attained.
3. Invest in Driver Training
The Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974 requires employers to safeguard the health, safety and wellbeing of employees, including when they are driving for work.
Before employees begin working for your fleet, assess and train them, to ensure they are capable and confident on the roads. A targeted training structure provides you with a fleet-wide standard of driving and satisfies the business’ duty of care requirements.
Monitor and evaluate their performances periodically. Driver training doesn’t need to be limited to new starters. Regular assessments throughout their employment will serve to refresh their skills, introduce employees to recent changes in legislation and ensure your drivers aren’t learning bad habits along the way. It will minimise the likelihood of preventable, costly accidents, saving you money in the long run.
Wessex Fleet offer comprehensive, cost-effective driver training programmes regardless of whether you have sourced your vehicles through us. Find out more here
4. Monitor Driver Behaviour
Monitoring driver behaviour increases safety on the roads and should be a primary goal for all fleet managers. Accidents cost businesses a great deal in resources and downtime of vehicles and employees, not to mention the potential for tragedies nobody wants to see happen. Encouraging safe driving habits is therefore always going to be a priority for all fleet managers.
Certain vehicle makes and models have safety features in-built. Here at Wessex fleet our experienced team can advise you which vehicles feature the most advanced safety features including detecting when pedestrians and cyclists are too close to the vehicle.
Fleet telematics are an important component of most fleet managers’ practices and involve vehicle tracking systems, enabling you to monitor your fleet and know where they all are. The installation of these have an impact on your employees’ driving as they know they are being monitored.
Real-time data can be accessed on any mobile device, with automated alerts and reports, driver behaviour monitoring, vehicle scoring and a variety of data you can pull reports on. This includes location, speed of travel, idling time, harsh acceleration, harsh braking, fuel consumption, vehicle faults and much more.
Here at Wessex Fleet, our telematics systems allow us to tailor data and reports based on your needs.
5. Optimise Fleet Functionality
Striking a balance is crucial for good fleet management. Too many vehicles can be unnecessarily costly but too few vehicles in your fleet will accelerate vehicle downtime and driver burnout.
Fleet managers must seek ways to optimise fleet size and vehicle usage by deploying the best vehicles for their purposes, performing periodic audits, training their drivers and leveraging route optimisation tools.
Knowing where all of your fleet’s cars are at all times is vital in order to increase the efficiency of your business fleet. Fleet telematics allows you to see exactly where the main cost areas are in addition to reducing the risks.
Wessex Fleet are skilled in providing all of the essential components to optimising fleet functionality, under one roof. We’ve been managing fleets since 2004.
Call us on 01722 322 888 or contact us here to find out more about how we can streamline your fleet management practices.
Enjoyed this article? Read more of our latest blogs below:
- Clean Air Zones and Your Fleet
- How Often Should You Be Inspecting Your Fleet
- 5 Checks When You Get a Company Car
- How Fleet Driver Training Saves Money
For all our latest news and blogs click HERE.
Or are you looking to understand the company car, fleet management or any other aspect of fleet vehicles? If so, then check out our Guide Pages.