If your business relies on a fleet of vehicles to carry out deliveries and maintain the supply chain, then it should be no surprise that a hefty portion of your cash flow goes towards managing it. However, that doesn’t mean you have to let the costs run wild on your budget. Here are some tips on how to treat the fleet as an investment that can be managed and, when done right, lead to more return.
Taking better care of your vehicles
The vehicles in your freight fleet are not only the tools for maintaining your supply chain, they are also highly valuable assets that should be treated as such. Ensuring a thorough preventative maintenance schedule for them is not only going to help them be more efficient on the road, it’s also going to help them retain more of their value for longer. Furthermore, it will stop you from having to invest in costly repairs that could be prevented with more routine attention.
Get the right vehicles in the right way
How do you obtain your fleet and how flexible should it be to increases and dips in demand? How you front the money for them can play a big role in how easy it is to get a return on investment. For instance, if you’re making a vehicle a permanent part of the fleet, vehicle financing may make it more immediately available, but buying it outright could be cheaper. Similarly, you should ask whether it really needs to be permanent, as services like CRDX equipment leasing could help you meet short-term needs but without the costs of taking on another vehicle to the fleet permanently.
Ensure the most efficient routes
Every trip that your vehicles take out from the headquarters is money being spent. How much they’re able to achieve on that trip directly correlates to how much value they return. Balancing the money spent per trip per what they can achieve is essential. The most important factor in this is routing and planning. Samsara’s dispatch software can help you track and record the routes the fleet takes. The advantage of this is that you can use that data to plan much more efficient routes in future, allowing your drivers to get more done in a shorter period of time, increasing your return on investment.
Manage your fuel expenses
Another benefit of dispatch and tracking software is that you can become a lot more cognizant of the costs of running your vehicles and what contributes to those costs. Amongst the most routine costs will be fuel. Besides ensuring more fuel efficient routes and teaching green driving habits, you can also invest in things like fuel cards that help you manage the costs of every time your drivers have to stop to refuel their vehicles.
Your business fleet can help make or break your business. You have to ensure that it runs as efficiently as possible and that you make better use of it to guarantee a return on your investment.