When budget planning time rolls around each year to address the needs of your fleet, the focus likely is on those big-ticket items—perhaps acquiring that new snowplow your municipality desperately needs, or the refrigerated unit your rental company has been holding off purchasing for a couple of years.
However, what may not initially be top-of-mind is adopting a new fleet management solution to track your assets and optimize your operations. While we understand that budgeting for one of these systems can be difficult, especially when facing shrinking operational budgets, we’re here to help you realize how purchasing or leasing a GPS tracking system can actually help to reduce your overhead and operational costs.
GPS tracking technology and an effective telematics software system can save your organization time and money, and provide peace of mind in a variety of situations—it’s a great risk management resource and can comprehensively address an array of challenges that you might be facing in your fleet operations.
Quick Links:
- What Does Fleet Management Entail?
- Fleet Management Challenges
- Why It Pays to Budget for Fleet Management
What Does Fleet Management Entail?
Fleet management is a nice, two-word name for an intricate series of tasks, responsibilities, and challenges that are involved with managing a fleet’s operations. This field involves many moving parts, such as:
- Fleet drivers
- Asset management
- Maintaining fleet vehicles
- Coordinating routes and schedules
- Tracking fleet metrics
- Preventing theft
- And more!
Effective fleet management is a core component for businesses, organizations, and municipalities to deliver a great experience for their customers and community.
A fleet manager has to streamline operations where possible and maximize productivity without maxing out their organization’s budget. This can be an incredibly complicated task since there are so many different factors that can affect performance—and that’s where leveraging a fleet management solution can be the ace up your sleeve.
Fleet Management Challenges
Before we jump into the various benefits that implementing a fleet management software can provide to your business or municipality, let’s address some of the common challenges involved with fleet management:
Lack of Accountability
Unless you’re able to sit in every fleet vehicle and micromanage each employee that keeps your fleet running, there’s a huge gap in knowledge of what happens between the beginning and end of a project or route. Your employees might be making personal errand runs on their route, not fully securing their cargo, breaking speed limits, and more that you simply can’t know about without utilizing a GPS tracking system.
Small Chance of Recovery In the Instance of Theft
It’s no secret that dealing with the theft of your fleet vehicle, assets, or other pertinent property can leave a damaging blow to your company’s timeline, budget, and reputation. Thieves can also make a target out of your business if they find little security or consequences come about after stealing your equipment. Unfortunately, without any GPS tracking ability, there’s a small chance that your items will be recovered.
Inefficient Operations
Ensuring your fleet drivers stay on task and aren’t needlessly crisscrossing your community on their routes due to scheduling inefficiencies is a common challenge that fleet managers face every week. These operational inefficiencies cost your company more and result in less getting done simply because your drivers are having to double back on their routes. Not implementing a GPS tracking system that can manage these routing logistics can lead to accelerated maintenance schedules and lost business.
Why It Pays to Budget for Fleet Management Software
Now that we’ve addressed just a few of the most common challenges that fleet managers have to mitigate every week as part of their role, let’s look at how an effective fleet management software solution can provide a variety of advantages including:
Financial Benefits
Using a fleet management solution like Rastrac’s GPS tracking software and devices can provide benefits that can be seen in your accounting profit column. A fleet management system can help to cut operational costs for virtually any municipality or organization in several ways that will improve your bottom line, including:
- Decreasing overhead costs by keeping drivers on task
- Reducing labor costs by monitoring driver or operator activities
- Slashing fuel costs by reducing idling and other inefficient drive behaviors
- Minimizing fuel theft and fraud issues by spotting reporting abnormalities
- Increasing productivity, which results in more work being done at a quicker pace
- Enhancing compliance through system monitoring, resulting in fewer compliance fines
- Mitigating frivolous or fraudulent lawsuits by being able to provide documented information and data
- The possibility of a discount from some insurance companies that offer reduced premiums for using GPS tracking systems
Last, but certainly not least, you can see a return on your investment by cutting costs and increasing operational efficiency. Reductions in overhead and expensive repairs can help a fleet management system pay for itself fairly quickly.
Operational Benefits
Not all benefits that come from using a fleet management system are monetary. By using fleet management software in conjunction with GPS tracking devices, you gain greater control of your assets when they are in the field. Furthermore, the system provides you with accurate, actionable data for reporting and decision-making to run your operations.
We’ve yet to meet an operational manager who doesn’t want to achieve more with a smaller budget and fewer resources. No matter your industry or the size of your organization, a GPS tracking system can help it become more efficient through:
- Enhanced vehicle tracking and monitoring
- Collection and reporting of accurate and timely data
- Vehicle maintenance scheduling and repair reminders based on asset diagnostics
- Programmable alerts and notifications
With alert notifications that auto-generate at specific time intervals or can be triggered by specific events, you’ll be able to stay in the know about the location and condition of your assets.
Theft Deterrence and Asset Recovery
High-value assets, such as vehicles and product loads, are often the targets of thieves, third-party renters, or even disgruntled employees. A key benefit of using Rastrac’s GPS tracking solutions is that it can aid in deterring criminals from targeting your high-value assets, as well as help in the recovery of those assets.
With GPS tracking, when a vehicle or piece of equipment is stolen, you can log in to the software online and get an instant update on its location. Additionally, with some GPS tracking systems, you can remotely disable the vehicle’s starter. This means you have information that law enforcement can use to recover the vehicle quickly, thereby reducing your costs of having to purchase new equipment.
Partner with Rastrac Today!
Rastrac has helped countless businesses and municipalities enjoy success with an effective fleet management solution. After all, there’s a reason we’re a leading provider of GPS tracking solutions for any situation and we’re entrusted to track more than $1.5 billion in assets around the world. Our success is predicated upon your success—and we’re eager to help you do more with less!
Speak with one of our fleet management experts today to learn how Rastrac can help your business achieve operational excellence.
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