The fleet is rundown, the manager is frustrated.
To ensure that your product delivery process is always ongoing and continuous, you need a healthy and efficient fleet. A suitable fleet largely guarantees timely and safe delivery of goods and is one of the important parameters in providing delivery services. Moreover, if your vehicle fleet cannot serve properly and orders are not delivered on time and with the required quality, you will face many problems. Customer dissatisfaction, time wastage due to fleet delays or breakdowns, and the high costs resulting from these issues can significantly damage your organization.
To optimize your business and the order delivery process, you need to take actions as solutions to counter these problems, which we will explain in detail below. In general, each parameter of your vehicle fleet should be examined from three aspects to decide on necessary improvements. These three include:
- Preventive measures for future problems
- Customer behavior analysis for decision-making
- Control, monitoring, and tracking
Following the above points, we will refer to these parameters and provide detailed explanations on how to optimize them.
Maintenance Costs
Every vehicle needs maintenance during its operational period to provide quality service. To prevent and consequently reduce the high costs that may arise in the future due to neglecting this aspect, your fleet needs to be periodically inspected. This inspection includes oil changes, replacement, and control of parts. In this regard, proper scheduling and routing are very effective in preventing future problems. For example, proper routing that keeps your fleet away from heavy traffic significantly reduces wear and tear and prevents premature part failures. As a suggestion, using tracking and routing programs is a good choice because they select the most efficient route for you with minimal resources and no specific costs. Regarding the analysis of your customers' behavior, it is necessary to mention that comprehensive information about the location and behavior of customers is important in route division, timing, and order delivery method, as each has a significant impact on your fleet's maintenance costs. For instance, if most of your customers are located in a specific province, planning based on the geography of that area greatly affects the health of your vehicle fleet.
Fuel Optimization
The most important factor in optimizing your fleet's fuel consumption is periodic monitoring and control. This process should be carried out based on the information received from tracking your fleet. You need to control your fleet's fuel consumption by scheduling and choosing the right route based on traffic and weather conditions. For example, a delivery truck stuck in traffic for four hours on a hot summer afternoon wastes a lot of fuel, especially if it uses a refrigerator for transporting food, which means hours of unnecessary fuel consumption. This information, along with analyzing your customers' behavior, can be very effective in preventing excess fuel consumption and reducing costs significantly, as knowing information such as peak order times and customer locations allows for better route selection and prevents energy and time wastage in traffic and crowded roads. The chart below shows the fuel costs of American vehicles over three consecutive years by month and distance traveled, indicating that fuel costs have generally increased, necessitating optimization and consumption reduction.
Proper Training and Hiring of Staff
Human resource management is important for greater efficiency in all businesses, and a business where transportation and delivery of goods are significant activities must pay attention to this important parameter. Your staff needs to have proper training and hiring based on the route and time they need to cover. For example, by training on the use of tracking and fleet management programs, many additional costs can be prevented. Because your driver, using these programs, selects the optimal route and provides useful reports on their position. This is very effective in controlling and monitoring the delivery process and vehicle fleet, eliminating many intermediaries and optimizing processes.
Behavioral Analysis and Staff Monitoring
After proper training and hiring, behavioral analysis of employees, or better said, control, monitoring, and tracking them, is very important to assess whether they have had appropriate productivity. By monitoring your staff's behavior, many of your company's weaknesses can be identified, and you can find suitable solutions to address these shortcomings. For example, if your fleet's fuel consumption is high or your organization's vehicles wear out quickly, it may be due to inappropriate driving, such as high speed and frequent braking, which increases your fleet's wear and tear. Fortunately, in today's technology world, there are many smart programs available for controlling and monitoring staff, which inform you in real-time of the speed, stop duration, and routes taken by your fleet. Among these software, Logiico can be mentioned.
Proper Loading
In large companies, such as those involved in freight or various goods transportation, the method of loading and arranging goods is very important, and analyzing customer behavior and location plays a crucial role in optimizing this process and maintaining the quality of delivered goods. For example, if orders from several customers are to be delivered by one fleet, arranging goods based on delivery priority is very important so that the goods of the customer the driver reaches first are at the front of the load and can be unloaded quickly. Also, when arranging goods, attention should be paid to the type of goods in terms of fragility or delicacy to ensure the quality of the order is not compromised.
Choosing the Right Fleet
As the last parameter in fleet maintenance, your vehicle fleet itself is very effective in the quality of your service delivery; since every business differs from others in terms of service and the area it serves, it is better to be careful in choosing a fleet that suits your business. To prevent and avoid potential problems, you should choose them based on the geographical area your fleet operates in and the geographical information of your customers; if they are to operate in a hot and dry climate, you should use a fleet suitable for this climate to prevent issues such as overheating and frequent breakdowns. Consulting a specialist in this field can be a good choice. Also, purchasing a fleet with accessible spare parts is very important so that if an issue like a breakdown occurs, there is no problem with replacement and repair. As a final point, it should be mentioned that insurance is one of the most important needs of your fleet to ensure that in cases such as accidents, loss of cargo due to heat, or any other natural or unnatural disaster, the damages incurred do not severely impact your company, at least financially.
Conclusion
Your fleet is like the lifeblood of your business, and if these veins do not function properly, your product delivery process will be completely disrupted, and your business will come to a halt. Using a suitable fleet relieves you of many problems and helps you focus on other parts of your organization. Many companies use GPS devices for tracking and monitoring their fleet, which, despite numerous capabilities like installing weight and temperature sensors, have issues, with high costs being the most significant of these services. If you do not need very specific analyses using various sensors, we recommend using simple tracking programs that only require installing these programs on your drivers' mobile phones to be informed in real-time of their location, time, speed, and stop duration; these programs, because they only use a simple software system, are much cheaper than physical versions using GPS devices and offer good features. Among these programs, we can mention the Logiico fleet management software, which, in addition to these services, provides complete support along with a free trial period.
