The Basics of Fleet Management

For companies, the fleet of trucks and vans represents the main company asset, and its management is the key to maintaining competitiveness and profitability. Onro’s last mile delivery software provides companies with some of the functions necessary for fleet management, for those who manage small vans as well as for those who own a fleet of heavy vehicles.

Even companies that do not deal with transport often have a company fleet, made up of vehicles assigned to salespeople or managers, or vans or trucks for deliveries to customers, and even in these cases, automated fleet management, offers extremely useful solutions, making a vehicle management program available to the company that covers the entire company fleet.

What is Fleet Management?

Fleet management includes all administrative tasks that a fleet entails:

• Maintenance of vehicle files
• Daily maintenance 
• Ensuring the traffic safety of transports
• Monitoring vehicle costs
• Management of fuel cards and control of fuel behavior
• Compliance with the conditions in the leasing contract: term, billing for excess or less kilometers, return modalities
• Route planning and booking of pool vehicles
• Driving license check
• Management of the fleet’s logbooks

The requirements vary from industry to industry. In the field, the main thing is efficient route planning. In fleet management for trucks in freight forwarding companies, the focus is on economical refueling behavior, taking breaks, load safety, and the optimal loading and unloading process.

Who Is Responsible for Fleet Management?

If the company is small, the entrepreneur usually handles fleet management himself or with his own office staff. Once the fleet reaches a certain size, a company needs a fleet manager. The qualifications for a fleet manager can be acquired, for example, if the fleet continues to grow, there is also the option of outsourcing fleet management to a service provider. Such service providers include leasing companies, automobile manufacturers, or large car rental companies.

If small businesses do their own fleet management, it is worth using good fleet management software to save time and meet all legal requirements.

What Does Fleet Management Software Do?

Administrative tasks, route planning, vehicle tracking as well as keeping logs are among the essential tasks of fleet management. In practice, companies often still work with Excel. This may allow some of the administrative tasks to be completed. However, as soon as several employees are involved in fleet management, fleet management software makes sense.

Administrative tasks

A good fleet management software offers in the area of ​​administration:

• Digital vehicle file: Here, entrepreneurs can store purchase and leasing contracts as well as documents for vehicle insurance for each vehicle. Maintenance work carried out can also be logged here.
• Digital recording of vehicle costs: Users can easily upload fuel receipts and invoices to the system, assign costs to individual trips and routes, or keep cost statistics.
• Vehicle booking: With a booking module, the entrepreneur can reserve pool vehicles for specific employees.

Vehicle tracking

Modern fleet management software is GPS-supported. This allows you to document routes and routes traveled. Pool vehicles can be precisely located at any time. In transportation, operators can optimize charging operations when they know when a vehicle will arrive at the charging location. The tracking can also be used to protect against theft if the system detects vehicle movements during scheduled rest periods.

Some systems also record telemetry data from individual trips. These are data such as speed, acceleration behavior, braking behavior and fuel consumption. These records are intended to ensure economical driving.

Route planning

Route planning is also an important function of modern fleet management systems. This will help you optimize travel times. In this way, transporters ensure economical transport. Sales employees use it to coordinate their customer visits.

Onro Software for Fleet Management

Onro’s Courier Management Software allows you to systematically monitor the work of the entire couriers and evaluate the professionalism of each driver. 

Data, which is gathered by the Onro, provides comprehensive information about driving performance, productivity, and efficiency. You get a wide range of options for efficient management of your fleet like route optimization in a short period of time.

Managing A Fleet of Vehicles

Even companies that do not deal with transport, but have a fleet of cars and company vehicles, need a tool to manage records, schedules, and dispatch relating to each vehicle.

The transport company needs management software for the company fleet of trucks and vehicles to schedule tasks, and the administrative obligations associated with it. Furthermore, you need tools to manage the routes relating to the tasks, check the performance of your fleet, and archive the digital traces of the tachographs. Correct fleet management also requires constant monitoring of the position of each vehicle.

Conclusion

Fleet management is the right solution for companies that seek to optimize costs. Specialized fleet companies take responsibility for fleet management, update, expand, or reduce it, and provide their equipment. For companies, this is an opportunity to save money and direct all its potential to carry out core activities and develop at an accelerated pace.