The Secret to Cutting Costs in Your Fleet

You’ve likely heard the saying – you have to spend money to make money.

When it comes to your fleet business, this might mean buying another vehicle, hiring more staff and taking on all the costs that comes with expanding your business. Inevitably, making these types of investments will make you money. With more vehicles and staff, you can take on more work and more customers, which means a bigger bottom line and wonderful success.

But not so fast. First, do you have the capital to invest in buying another vehicle? Not just the upfront cost, but insurance, fuel, and ongoing maintenance? Are you ready to bring a new employee on payroll? Do you have customers beating down your door and jamming your phone lines to request your services?

If you can say yes to all of these questions, then by all means, go for it.

However, for most fleet businesses, it’s just not that simple. This is where running your fleet more efficiently and cost savings becomes crucial to business growth. By streamlining your operation, you can take on more work without taking on more costs. You can make money by spending less money.

Here are 4 simple ways to cut costs and increase capacity:

1. Increase Routing Efficiency to Add More Jobs to the Schedule

By analyzing service requests and locations, you can find the shortest and most efficient routes for your drivers. Once you eliminate the need for a driver to zig-zag across town all day, you’ll save on both fuel and time. And with that extra time, you could likely add another job to the schedule. Now multiply that by the number of drivers you have serving customers. It can add up quickly.

2. Real-Time Visibility into Your Vehicles & Drivers

Take control over your fleet and instantly monitor your drivers’ location, trips and route behavior. With fleet tracking, one of our clients found out that their workers were regularly taking two hour lunches at Hooters and took immediate action to stop this behavior. Imagine the number of hours that would have been wasted if the employees’ behavior had continued to go unnoticed?

3. Improve Vehicle Maintenance and Prevent Breakdowns

When a vehicle breaks down, how much do you lose each day? By tracking miles driven and ensuring your vehicles are properly maintained, you’ll greatly limit the number of breakdowns, the cost it takes to get up and running again, and the need to push out or turn down jobs. And you’ll want to have your staff keep an eye on that check engine light, so those issues can also be addressed right away. By keeping up on maintenance, you’ll be ready to take on any jobs that come your way.

4. Ensure Driver Safety

Having an employee who thinks they’re a NASCAR driver can be detrimental in a number of ways. Poor behaviors like speeding and excessive idling increase your fuel costs, as well as the wear and tear on your vehicles. It can also lead to costly accidents, which means downtime and even a massive hike in your insurance premiums. And if a potential customer sees a vehicle with your business name on it ripping through a school zone at 55 mph, it certainly doesn’t make a good impression.

Discourage poor driving behaviors with fleet management solutions that offer basic driver performance tools, such as audible alerts for hard braking or acceleration.

Curbing these behaviors is key to cutting costs across the board, increasing your availability to take on more work, and making the right impression on current and potential customers in your service areas.

Make Cutting Costs Easy

With the help of a GPS fleet management system like FleetLocate, capitalizing on all of these opportunities to streamline your business is simple. From real-time route optimization to driver performance reporting.

Our newest FleetLocate solution lets any business reduce operational expenses, with a no-hassle plug-n-play install and easy to use tracking software.

Start lowering costs on fuel, breakdowns, accidents and insurance costs. And increase your ability to take on more jobs – without investing thousands of dollars on new vehicles and personnel.

Click here to learn more about our fleet management solutions, or call us at 1-877-819-0015 to schedule a demo.

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