Is fleet management an expense or an investment?
Fleet management is an essential investment for any company that has a fleet of vehicles or machines. In the following post we discuss aspects of it to determine if it is cost or investment.
Let’s look at the costs
Fuel cost and type of driving:Fleet Management reduces fuel costs by controlling, for example, idle times and type of driving.
Cost of insurance:Insurance companies usually lower their premiums whenever Fleet Management is contracted, since the risk of accident and theft is reduced. The reduction in the cost of insurance is usually 10%.
Remote diagnostics: A Fleet Management system that has remote diagnosis can help us detect a problem more quickly and cheaply, since we will know what fault our machine or vehicle has before sending the mechanic and, therefore, we can save trips, time and stress.
Tpms: The Tire Pressure and Temperature monitoring system used in heavy trucks helps us avoid blowouts (towing a damaged trailer on a motorway can cost about 3,000 Euros), reduce fuel costs by 3% and reduce maintenance costs, Since when the pressure is incorrect the tire wears unevenly and can in turn cause damage to other parts of the truck such as axles or suspension.
Let’s look at productivity
Control reviews:Fleet Management allows us to automatically control the periodic reviews of our vehicles or machines. I have seen cases in which before starting to use a fleet management system, the 600 periodic verifications (4 per machine and year) of a fleet of 160 machines were controlled through an Excel, which can be tedious and unproductive.
Global fleet control; If you do not have a Fleet Management system that allows you to have a global vision of it by the management team, it is very difficult to be sure that everything is correct in the field of legal verifications, etc. An Advanced Fleet Management system should give a quick view of how the fleet is, and even have a system of notifications by mail or SMS and that allows us to know and document important incidents. The question is: Do we believe what someone tells us, or do we know that everything is correct with respect to the fleet based on OBJECTIVE DATA provided by the system?
Using the Data captured by the system: The first layer is to capture data and present it so that the company can have control and decision making, the second would be to automate all that decision making to increase efficiency, productivity, reduce costs and consequently increase ROI (return on investment); currently there are already systems that can “train” (for large tonnage trucks) automatically and in real time to each of the drivers of a fleet. These systems capture data with a cadence of 1″, and have a holistic view of the entire fleet, allowing that the system can automatically know how each of the drivers is driving, learn (Machine Learning) and correct them in real time to achieve fuel savings that can be of the order of 15%.
Thus, and after analyzing productivity, costs, and the control that is gained by having a fleet management system, we can affirm that fleet management is an investment and not an expense.