The 4 most common mistakes in corporate fleet management
Enterprise mobility management is often underestimated. Yet, careful fleet management offers significant advantages to companies, entrepreneurs and employees.
Many companies that adopt fleet management systems are able to reduce fuel costs, increase employee productivity, reduce infringements involving company vehicles, optimize routes and travel times, thus contributing to the well-being of employees forced to travel less time by car. Organizational efficiency then translates into time savings and greater profits.
Where to start from to implement the use of the fleet?
It is necessary for companies to start by understanding their needs and recognizing any difficulties and obstacles in the workflow. It is precisely from this awareness, for example, that we can start to develop digital solutions tailored to the fleet to be managed and the related workflow.
Most problems instead arise from errors in judgment and lack of information. Here are the mistakes that are most often made in fleet management:
1. Believing that there isn’t much to control
The lack of information about driving style, the people responsible for receiving fines, the real-time position of vehicles for optimizing routes and periods of inactivity, parking times with the engine running, etc. it is the basis of errors, delays and waste of time and resources. However, if you take control of that information, you can immediately identify any problems and take immediate action.
2. Ignore TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
The Total Cost of Ownership is an important parameter to know and keep under control to optimize the costs of your company fleet. TCO is the total cost of ownership of a vehicle, including the purchase cost, any operating and maintenance costs incurred over the life of the car, as well as any resale proceeds.
To minimize the TCO it is necessary to know how to choose the vehicle with the correct specifications and suited to the needs of the fleet (excessive specifications sometimes imply an unnecessary price surplus and, on the contrary, excessively low specifications can lead to frequent breakdowns and lower returns in case of resale.
The TCO, essentially, is the cost of the vehicle itself to which the costs of fuel, maintenance, insurance, interest, commissions, licenses, etc. are added. Some costs are fixed and others variable and it is precisely on the latter that we can and must intervene to contain the total TCO.
3. Not paying due attention to maintenance
The maintenance of company fleets can be one of the most expensive expense items, especially for companies with large fleets. If the monitoring of the efficiency of the vehicles is inadequate, there is a risk of not noticing technical problems which, if not resolved in time, can lead to unexpected breakdowns of greater scope and cost, in addition to the damage due to the interruption of the vehicle’s activity in question.
In this regard, another mistake is to neglect driving behaviors which, if inappropriate, can increase the risk of wear and improper use of the vehicles, with a negative consequence on expenses in the long term.
4. Thinking that fleet management software costs too much
In reality, digital and/or telematic solutions largely repay the initial investment over time precisely because of the contribution of a series of optimizations and controls that we talked about in point 1.
Technology at the service of the company fleet
There are specific software and applications that allow you to manage company fleet activities in a centralized way, providing information on the entire life of the vehicles, on assignments, maintenance, documentation, routes, geolocation, travel times and much more. Fleet Manager is a software used with satisfaction for years by two well-known German and one Italian car manufacturers. Here’s how Fleet Manager solved the problems of 3 customers:
A. Italian car manufacturer
How to optimize fleet management for marketing events
B. German car manufacturer 1
How to optimize the assignment of company cars to employees and managers
C. German car manufacturer 2
How to effectively manage the payment of company fleet fines
Would you like to know more?
If you are interested in taking your fleet management to the next level, contact us without obligation and tell us how we can help you!