Good organization and fleet managemet can mean increasing the life of a vehicle or reducing its costs. Managing a fleet means being in many places simultaneously, organizing the day’s schedule, making sure the cars are in working order, staying on budget, controlling fuel and maintenance costs, and much more. The truth is that without the right information about your fleet, it is almost impossible to manage it successfully.

This article will look at four important metrics that will greatly assist you in maintaining good fleet management practices.

1. Available cars

Car availability includes all cars that are available for work. The team responsible for the company’s fleet management needs to know which cars are unavailable, but the more the number of vehicles increases, the more likely it is to make mistakes. Information should be easily accessible. The percentage of active vehicles divided by categories (cars, trucks, trailers, and others) should be visible.

You can quickly and easily check available cars for work with our start service. 

2. Cars in use

This indicator shows exactly how many cars are currently in use, what class they are and the percentage of vehicles in use within 24 hours. One of the basic rules for success is to optimize your fleet to 90 percent utilization. This means that if you have 100 cars, 90 of them must be in use. In addition, to easily adapt a fleet to growth, we should aim for 95% utilization, with the remaining 5% providing the ability to quickly adapt in case of growth. How many cars have been used within the last 24 hours you can check with GPS trackers. They will show unequivocally which cars have been used and which have not in the last 24 hours or a randomly selected time period.

If you are experiencing difficulties in the company management of the company’s car fleet and too many cars remain unused, you can rent out cars with the Car Sharing service.

3. Timely maintenance, prevention and service

Preventive maintenance and servicing is one of the most important things in fleet management and contributes the most to achieving compliance with standards for maintaining good performance in general. If you don’t already have a preventive maintenance and service plan in place, now is the time for your team to tackle this task.

If you use the starting service of VEM Technology, you will not miss a car service.

4. Repair costs

Quality control and management software should display:

  • Frequency of repairs;
  • Location of the problem;
  • Repeat repairs;
  • Cause of the problem;
  • Premature defects on the car;
  • Serious damage.

Despite the precautions taken in advance, nothing lasts forever. You’ll have to deal with problem cars from time to time, but that’s just a natural part of running an active fleet. Without a proper management plan, repair costs can quickly spiral out of control. Again, controlling this information could give you deeper insight into the process, which could save you money down the road.

More accurate distribution of repair costs

Since there are more than 15,000 parts for any one vehicle, the process of distinguishing faults can be quite complex. It is extremely important to create a list of the 25 most frequently replaced or repaired parts of the car, which will save you a long time wandering through the list of 15,000+ items. This is where the time comes for software to manage the fleet for you.

Break down fleet management costs by:

  • Used parts for any repair;
  • Vehicle class;
  • Type;
  • Monthly cost;
  • Quarterly expense;
  • Annual expense.

Keeping your vehicles on the road and in good condition while keeping parts and repair costs low can be quite difficult, especially if you don’t have a fleet management system. The important principle here is to aim for a balanced cost, both for the parts and the labor you pay. If for every 1 lev going to a certain part of the car, you give 1 lev for the labor itself, then you are doing very well with the organization. It sounds easier in theory than in practice. If you’re dealing with a new fleet, with cars less than 2 years old, achieving balance is much easier because the parts don’t need to be replaced as often. However, if you have older vehicles, the ratio would be 2:1 or 3:1 because your labor costs will be higher.

The takeaway from the above is that you know best how your fleet is performing. Extracting the maximum information you need requires both a GPS fleet management system and a powerful organization system that aims to reduce the chaos as much as possible and help you focus on what matters most – your business goals .