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8 questions to ask as a Fleet Manager
14 May 2018
As a fleet manager, you can often feel like you have a lot of work to do, and not enough time. For this reason, it’s vital to ask the right questions and prioritise your tasks.
What follows are 8 important questions to consider if you are a fleet manager...
1. How do I keep my costs down?
Operating a cost-effective fleet is one of the most important factors to consider as a fleet manager. Make sure you have enough autonomy from upper management to ensure fluid decision making, and that you consider establishing a criteria for the fleet.
2. What criteria do you want to use to grow the fleet?
There are dozens of important factors to consider. Take note to look at the size and carrying capacity of the vehicles, the fuel efficiency, the type of work that they’ll be doing, and their expected lifespan.
3. How do I make sure that both the fleets and the drivers are safe?
As a fleet manager, it is vital that you ensure the safety of your drivers and vehicles. You want to create a culture of safety among your drivers with open lines of communication, mutual respect, and appropriate policies.
4. What are the key performance indicators I want to use for my fleet? (KPI)
KPI’s are vital if you want to effectively track your fleet performance. You can separate the fleet into different criteria and then into individual metrics. For example, safety can be measured by accidents per millions of miles driven, affordability by cost per mile, energy efficient by MPG and sustainability by greenhouse gas omissions per vehicle per year.
5. Where should I be focus my time?
This seems straightforward but is actually a very important question. Lots of managers waste time not because they don’t know what to do, but because they haven’t specifically asked this question.
6. How do I see unauthorised use of corporate vehicles?
Sometimes unauthorised use of corporate vehicles can be hard to stop, but also hard to track. You may want to look towards software that allows you this monitoring capacity, and a policy that makes your attitude towards this use crystal clear.
7. How do I benchmark driver behaviour?
There are a number of issues to consider when assessing driver behaviour. You may want to look at different factors such as excessive idling, fast cornering, speeding, aggressive acceleration and harsh braking. Again you’ll likely need a technology that helps you with this process.
8. How do I reduce accidents?
Whether you’re running a fleet with a handful of vehicles or a thousand, you want to minimise the number of accidents as much as possible. This starts with driver screening but continues with clear policy and communication between fleet managers and drivers.
Having an effective fleet management strategy always starts with asking the right questions. What experience have you had managing a fleet? Are there any questions we missed? Let us know in the comments!
If you’d like to find out more about our fleet management service or our other leasing options, leave us a comment, send us an email at info@marshall-leasing.co.uk, or call us 01480 414541.
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