Fleet management and maintenance software are more than just another digital platform or application. It’s a robust solution that can solve some of your company’s biggest pain points and usher you into the digital age.
What is Fleet Management Software?
Fleet management is the process of managing commercial vehicles (like cars, trucks, and vans) to ensure they’re safe, efficient, and well-maintained. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure vehicles yield a positive ROI for the business and that they aren’t a liability.
Fleet management software is a system that’s used to streamline and automate various fleet management tasks and responsibilities. The goal is to improve efficiency in a hands-off manner. These software systems are typically cloud-based platforms that integrate a variety of individual features as it relates to vehicle tracking, driver management, maintenance, warranty management, and more.
The Top Benefits of Fleet Management Software
Fleet management software is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have. This becomes quite evident when you look at the specific benefits it provides businesses:
- Greater Efficiency With good fleet management software, you experience far less vehicle downtime. That’s because you get up-to-the-minute diagnostic reports on mileage, engine hours, etc. And once something is flagged in the system, parts are ordered, repairs are scheduled, and an entire web of resources comes into play. The end result is far greater efficiency than any manual system offers.
- Increased ROI
Fleet management software ensures nothing slips through the cracks. Solutions like Cetaris are particularly effective when it comes to warranty capture (a weak spot for many businesses).
With a robust warranty capture system in place, you can increase warranty reimbursements by tracking agreements more closely and flagging warrantable parts and labor when there are issues. This includes reporting on missed warranted, tracking failure patterns, identifying chronic repairs that happen outside of a warranty, gauging the monetary value of warranties, and even expediting supplier payments.
- Improved Safety Let’s not forget about safety. Because if you don’t have safe drivers and processes, your efficiency, ROI, and everything else is getting flushed down the proverbial toilet. Thankfully, fleet management software also helps in this regard.
Depending on the fleet management software you go with, there should be a way to create real-time alerts and notifications. This allows you to send automated alerts anytime a driver/vehicle experiences rapid acceleration, sudden braking, sharp turning, tailgating, etc.
Real-time feedback like this is far more effective than performance feedback that’s sent out in an email report at the end of the month. (By that point, the driver probably has no recollection of the specific safety issue that’s being highlighted.)
- Better Visibility The top fleet management systems have very detailed GPS tracking features that allow you to track every single vehicle in your fleet at all times. This means you always know where your fleet is and how each vehicle is performing. This increased visibility can improve fuel cards tracking and economy by helping you better optimize routes.
- Greater Satisfaction At the end of the day, fleet management software leads to greater satisfaction across the board. This includes greater satisfaction for:
- Fleet managers Nobody loves fleet management software more than a fleet manager. It makes your job so much easier by streamlining all of the mundane, manual tasks that used to cause you to pull your hair out. It allows you to work on big–picture strategic processes, rather than getting stuck in the weeds.
- Fleet drivers, Believe it or not, fleet drivers love fleet management software too. While they might not love all of the oversight, they can appreciate the fact that it rewards good behaviors and efficiencies. The good drivers see it as a net positive.
- End customers The end customer might not know anything about fleet management software, but they enjoy the benefits it affords them. Namely, it leads to faster and more accurate delivery of products and services.
When fleet managers, fleet drivers, and end customers are more satisfied, this also means upper management is more satisfied. That makes an investment in fleet management software one of the smartest investments you can make!
