Discovering that you need to expand your fleet is great news – it means your business is growing.
But each additional vehicle increases your costs. Adding fleet vehicles increases your insurance premiums, and more drivers on the road mean more chances of an accident – along with the related costs and liability. There’s also increased fuel and maintenance expenses.
Cut Fleet Costs with Data-Driven Business Insight
This can sound daunting on the surface. Especially if your business delivers a service and your fleet is just a means to reach your customers and not core to your mission. But with a straightforward plan – a plan informed by your operational data – it doesn’t have to be daunting at all.
Data-driven decisions put cost-cutting power in your hands. You can take action quickly and be sure that as your revenue and fleet grow, you’re squeezing every drop of extra expense out of your operations – and maximizing the profit that hits your bottom line.
How To Take Cost-Cutting Action on Your Fleet Fuel Expense
To start, let’s look at fuel costs. With fuel prices hitting the highest point in seven years, the news coverage makes it sound like an expense that’s out of your control. It’s not. The key is knowing what actions will make a cost-reducing difference.
Here’s how to take action using insight from your unified telematics, safety and operational data:
Conduct a Vehicle Route Review
Are your routes optimized? Make sure your drivers can service the maximum number of customers in a day. Looking at historical route trends shows the sticking points that are costing you fuel and time. Are drivers traveling extra miles? Can a route or schedule change reduce time spent idling in traffic?
Correct Negative Driver Behaviors
A lot of your fuel expense comes from driver behaviors like harsh braking and acceleration, speeding, idling and unauthorized vehicle use. These behaviors are preventable when you use the information reported by your telematics and safety equipment to coach your drivers to success.
Ensure Your Drivers Fuel Up at the Lowest Priced Station
A fuel management solution helps cut fleet costs because it can prevent unauthorized purchases, track miles per gallon, and show your drivers the lowest priced station on their route.
Optimize Your Vehicle Utilization
With routing streamlined, it’s likely that you can cover more business with the same resources. Now, you can add vehicles to your fleet when they’re absolutely needed, and not a moment sooner. Given the current chip shortage that’s making fleet expansion a challenge, this is especially important.
Inspections and maintenance are next on the list. These are profit killers if they’re not consistently and proactively performed. To ensure compliance and reduce costs, digitize your inspection process and automate reporting. Now, you’ll identify small issues and send them them to your maintenance crew in real time. That means problems are resolved quickly, before they deteriorate into costly repairs or downtime.
Finally, a powerful step in preventing escalating costs is reducing safety-related incidents. This takes on-the-road visibility. You’ve got to know what’s happening when your drivers are behind the wheel and be able to take action.
A study in the Journal of Safety Research found that deploying dual-facing dash cameras can reduce safety incidents by 60% and cut accident-related costs by an incredible 86%. If the cameras are powered by AI (artificial intelligence), you’ll maximize your cost reduction efforts with real-time alerting and in-cab coaching on even hard-to-detect behaviors like following too close, distracted or fatigued driving, or a hazard in the roadway.
Real-Time, In-Cab Coaching to Prevent Avoidable Accidents
With real-time coaching and on-demand video, you’ll prevent avoidable accidents and have the evidence needed to exonerate your drivers in the event of a false claim of liability for accident or property damage. And, ask your insurance provider about premium discounts or subsidies for deploying a fleet dash cam program – many offer them.
The takeaway here is, when you digitize and unify your operational data, you can quickly identify and take action to reduce the excessive costs in your business.
Ready to cut fleet costs? See how IntelliShift’s all-in-one solution for growing fleets can improve your bottom line.
