Downtime is not an option for any kind of fleet, including truck fleets. In order to stay on schedule and keep the rubber on the road, leveraging data and managing efficiencies have to be at the core your fleet management strategy.
Truck Fleet Management Solutions
From light-duty to large big rigs, truck fleets often times manage the delivery of time-sensitive materials, so it is critical for you to ensure that all your assets are in a good condition. Many truck fleets struggle a lot with downtime mainly because their fleet is spread out across long distances, and breakdowns can occur at any time, especially if there is no proper maintenance plan in place. So, to prevent and manage unplanned breakdowns and keep up with maintenance tasks, it’s very critical for you to have comprehensive way to manage and track your truck fleet on a regular basis.
Our fleet management solutions provide you with the tools that you need to manage every element of your fleet, starting from maintenance, inspection, to cost analysis and driver management. The ability to track your fleet data in a centralized software empowers you and your business to make informed decisions regarding fleet expenses, helping you to develop strategies that guarantee success.
We have put together few best practices you need to implement into your truck fleet management strategy in order to run a successful fleet.
- Keep Up with Preventive Maintenance Tasks
The first and the most important step to avoiding downtime for your truck fleet is to ensure that your trucks are properly maintained regularly. Ignoring or delaying to take care of simple service tasks like changing oil d tire rotations can ultimately lead to costly repairs. To keep up with regular service tasks, it’s important to have a preventive maintenance schedule in place to help keep track of maintenance, prevent downtime and maximize vehicle lifespan. With our fleet management solutions, you can set up mobile reminders based on meter readings and driving time intervals just to make sure that your trucks never miss any maintenance or regular servicing. The Preventive maintenance schedules can be managed for both outsourced and in-house maintenance. If you outsource your maintenance like many other truck fleets, we hep you to manage repair orders, set automatic approvals and get your vehicles back on the road as fast as possible.
- Maintain Compliance with DVIR
Daily Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIR) are required not only for your purposes but to make sure that you stay compliant with Department of Transportation (DOT) regulations. In addition to these, regular inspections help uncover issues and pass information to fleet managers to begin the maintenance process. The majority of truck fleets are still using paper DVIR, which most of the times cause delays in the maintenance process. This kind of inspection is time-consuming for drivers, and the results are often misplaced, resulting in further delays.
When you have assets all across different countries or regions, it’s important to receive inspection results quickly. Electronic DVIR allows drivers a quick and easy way to perform inspections on a a device and instantly upload results into your fleet management software. These eDVIR automatically report issues on vehicles that need urgent attention. Streamlining issue detection and management ensures that your trucks get the fix and repair they need quickly in order to reduce downtime in the shop.
- Monitor Fuel Usage with Fleet Fuel Cards
Trucks are quite the gas-guzzlers, and fuel is the largest on-going expense for any fleet. Being able to track fuel costs easily is one of the best ways to manage costs.
Unfortunately, many truck fleets are still trying to keep up with paper receipts and manually enter fuel data.
Integrating fleet fuel cards with fleet management software is a great way to easily access all fuel data in a centralized location. Track cost-per-mile and odometer readings in real-time and get a look at your overall fuel spending.
Another major benefit of fuel card integration is the ability to control fuel expenses and prevent fraud. Set driver limits and restrictions to ensure your drivers don’t overspend.
Connecting your fuel card to your fleet management software provides you with up-to-date data by downloading all transactions daily. This quick access to data reduces the risk of overlooking critical issues and discrepancies for weeks or months at a time.
- Capture Vehicle Data with Telematics
If you have been in the industry for some time you will agree with us that maintaining visibility of your assets can be a little difficult sometimes, it’s even worse when your trucks are spread out across different regions. To efficiently receive updates on your assets and track your drivers, you should consider integrating your telematics devices into your truck fleet management tool. The information you will receive will hep provide you with crucial insight into the safety and compliance of your drivers and assets.
Integrating telematics into your software allows you to receive accurate and instant odometer readings and diagnostic trouble codes for your fleet. This will empower and enables you to act quickly if issues arise.
- Calculate Total Cost of Ownership
Being able to control and manage fleet expenses is one of the main challenges faced by fleet managers. Truck fleets are part of some of the most expensive of all fleets, and you being able to understand your true total cost of ownership is very important. You knowing the TCO gives you the insight you need into fleet trends and also helps you track expenses in order to make data-driven fleet management decisions. Manual tracking of TCO is one of the difficulty faced by fleet managers and owners, which eventually leads to missed opportunities and unnecessary expenses.
Our fleet management software automatically calculates your fleet’s TCO by compiling fleet data into easy-to-read reports, this helps you save time as it eliminates the headache of number-crunching. It is also one of the best ways to determine your truck fleet’s TCO and gives you a better understanding of your overall fleet operations.
Hammer down your truck maintenance strategy and reduce downtime for your fleet with Letiway! Request a free consultation today.
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