3 Easy Ways to Simplify Your Fleet Management Rastrac Team | Mar 17, 2016 2:50:17 PM

Managing a fleet of vehicles for any company isn’t an easy task. Between managing drivers, handling maintenance tasks, and filling out reports to both your boss and to regulatory bodies, the list of duties you have to handle as a fleet manager never seems to end.

However, there are ways to simplify your fleet management so that you can focus on making your organization’s vehicle fleet more effective and efficient rather than playing keep up with your task list.

How can you make fleet management simpler? Here are 3 easy ways:

1: Collect GPS Data on Every Vehicle in Your Fleet

One of the biggest hassles in dealing with paperwork is sifting through all of the reports your drivers file and accounting for inconsistencies.

For example, there are often differences between odometer reading reports at the end of one trip and the start of the next. Usually, this is the result of a driver forgetting to log their personal use of a vehicle, and not a malicious act.

Even though such inconsistencies are often innocent, having to account for them can be a pain.

To save time and headaches, you can use GPS fleet tracking software to help you monitor and log the use of every vehicle in your fleet. This way, you can account for every mile traveled, giving you the info you need when you’re filing IFTA taxes and other vehicle use-related reports.

2: Integrate Your Custom Mapping Solution with a GPS Fleet Tracking Software Plugin

There are many cases where publically-available map data doesn’t accurately reflect the road systems your vehicles operate in. Whether this is because of frequent heavy construction, omissions of private roads, or other issues isn’t important. What’s important is that this leaves you without accurate map data.

To this end, many organizations use custom mapping software to help them make better roadmaps of local areas for drivers to use.

While it may take some upfront work to do it, integrating your custom mapping solution with your GPS fleet tracking software’s map plugin can save you a lot of time and effort down the road.

By integrating a map plugin with your custom map data, you can make sure that your GPS solution will always provide drivers with the best, most efficient routes, and that private roads aren’t missed.

This, naturally, requires a GPS software solution that has a map marker plugin.

3: Collect Information on Driver Behaviors to Use in Reviews

This might sound odd, but taking the time to use GPS data to collect information on driver behaviors to use in your performance reviews can make fleet management easier.

First, simply having this data is a powerful tool for getting drivers to change their bad habits. If you can show drivers the hard data about the driving habits they need to correct, then it’s often easier to convince them to embrace change.

Second, this can help you more easily identify whether or not a driver is actively engaging in fuel theft/fraud. By spotting large discrepancies between reported fuel use and distance traveled, you can help limit the effect of fuel theft/fraud on your organization.

While this will have you sorting through some extra data in the short run, it will greatly supplement your ability to manage your vehicle fleet’s drivers, making things easier in the long run.

These are just a few of the ways that you can make your fleet management tasks easier by using a GPS fleet tracking software solution.

Need to know more about GPS fleet tracking? Check out our other GPS fleet management resources!