Rastrac recognizes how instrumental your fleet of vehicles is for your business in delivering promises to your customers. To best serve your employees and your buyers, your fleet needs to be properly managed and attended to; one of the most practical manners to do this is by monitoring and evaluating your fleet’s key performance indicators. Better known as KPIs, these metrics help determine where your fleet is at in terms of maintenance, operational optimization, and overall cost to your company.
Read on to get a better understanding of why fleet management KPIs matter, and which ones your fleet needs to be tracking!
Quick Links
- What is Fleet Management?
- What are Fleet Management KPIs?
- Why do Fleet Management KPIs Matter?
- Top Fleet Performance Metrics to Track
- How Rastrac can Help You Track the Performance KPIs That Matter
What is Fleet Management?
Fleet management is the act of managing all the various tasks involved with running and monitoring vehicle and equipment fleets. This includes drive time, scheduled servicings, fuel intake, and more! As a fleet manager, you're in charge of maximizing efficiency while reducing costs, plus managing both your vehicles and the drivers who operate them throughout the day-to-day. Any business that relies on transportation will conduct some form of fleet management in order to keep these operations running smoothly.
What are Fleet Management KPIs?
Fleet management KPIs are the standards by which your vehicles should operate. These factors of fleet performance demonstrate how exactly your vehicles are functioning, potential areas of improvement or optimization, a comprehensive overview of the financial impact your fleet has on the organization’s budget, and more. Fleet managers have a variety of data available to them regarding the performance and longevity of their fleet vehicles, but utilizing this data in the most effective manner is critical for your business.
Why do Fleet Management KPIs Matter?
Fleet management KPIs are essential to monitoring and adjusting your fleet operations. Your fleet vehicles represent your company out in the world - you certainly want them working as efficiently and effectively as possible! Leveraging the data from your fleet vehicles in relation to your fleet’s KPIs provides a foundation for understanding vehicle performance or lack thereof.
Cohesive knowledge of fleet management KPIs is also helpful for keeping your fleet on track, and communicate the standard of performance each vehicle should be reaching. KPIs give your team a practical approach to service your budget and your customers.
Top Fleet Performance Metrics to Track
It can be tough to figure out which fleet KPIs are critical to monitor and which are less important. Rastrac recommends the following metrics to track your fleet:
Driver Performance
The vehicles don’t drive themselves; that’s why it’s essential to monitor driver performance and behavior through metrics such as:
- Acceleration patterns and sharp braking, which can indicate erratic driving patterns and risk for your company to be held liable in case of an accident. Safety should be the top priority for your fleet drivers, so they should be adhering to speed limits, demonstrating courtesy to other drivers, and ensuring they follow all road directions.
- Odometer mileage, which can indicate if the vehicle is being driven off-route or for personal use by the driver. If one vehicle is accumulating a significant amount of mileage over its comparable vehicles, that would raise some questions about the usage of that vehicle.
- Route adherence, which can be tracked with GPS systems. Your customers expect prompt service and drivers are instrumental in getting where they need to go at the approximate time of arrival. Monitoring a driver’s route will more specifically indicate if they take the scenic route or if they comply with route optimization guidelines provided by your company.
Diagnostic Codes & Maintenance Records
The car is only as good as you keep it. Both internally and externally, your fleet vehicles should be kept in good condition whether in terms of routine oil changes or periodic cleaning of the interior or exterior of the vehicle. Such metrics to monitor on this front include:
- Tracking how much time and how frequently you take your fleet vehicles in for maintenance. This includes watching for patterns in repeat diagnostic codes that keep popping up, so your mechanic can investigate further into any recurring issues you might experience.
- Keeping inventory of the most commonly replaced vehicle parts can save you time and money in the long run. These might include oil or cabin filters, spark plugs, or battery of the vehicle. It would be helpful to also include notes about the expected longevity of these parts to compare the expectation and reality of its performance.
- Vehicle breakdown numbers should be followed, as well. A high rate of vehicle breakdowns could be an indication that the current fleet maintenance plan is insufficient and needs to be modified. Fleet managers should track breakdown incidents and try to determine the cause so such disruptions can be prevented.
Total Cost of Ownership of the Vehicle
The point of all this data is to give you a comprehensive understanding of how your fleet is being managed, delivering expectations, and ultimately costing your business to use. This is an overall metric that combines the initial cost of a vehicle, its fuel consumption, its maintenance, and all other costs related to owning and fielding the vehicle (including taxes, licenses, storage fees, etc.) for the company over time.
Tracking TCO for individual fleet assets and comparing them to the revenue they generate can be crucial for identifying opportunities to create cost efficiencies. Recognizing the real cost of your fleet can also help you and your team plan for the future growth of your company.
How Rastrac can Help You Track the Performance KPIs That Matter
Rastrac fleet tracking software and GPS tracking devices help fleet managers gather critical information about their vehicular assets—such as start/stop times, driver behaviors, and current positions. This makes it easier to track your most important fleet management metrics so you can spend less time collating data and more time creating cost efficiencies.
Interested to learn more about how Rastrac can help transform your fleet management KPIs? Contact us today!
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