September 17, 2019

Still managing your fleet in spreadsheets?

Managing your fleet using spreadsheets limits your ability to harvest the value of big data surrounding your fleet.

The reliance on spreadsheets for managing fleets is still widespread across organisations – and it’s costly, both financially and operationally.

The pervasiveness of spreadsheets

Fleet management software gives you in-depth understanding of your fleet’s utilisation and peak demand. It provides data on individual journey distances and check-in/check-out times of vehicles across your whole fleet that can be analysed in a myriad of ways to meet your business needs. Not only this, having a fleet software system will also allow you to identify effective vs ineffective journeys.

Through years of market experience and customer engagement, it is apparent that spreadsheets are still widely used across the industry. It is particularly prevalent in smaller-scale fleets where management may be more achievable, en though the opportunity cost is hidden by a lack of visibility and awareness

Automated alerts

One of the main benefits that you could be missing out on by not using fleet management software is automated alerts. Automated alerts provide an overview of vehicles approaching their next scheduled maintenance based off the numbers of miles travelled, or that a driver’s licence is due to expire and needs updating. This allows you to proactively manage your fleet and reduce costs.

The costs of having an unlicensed driver using your fleet, or a vehicle that has exceeded its scheduled maintenance interval, can quickly snowball.

Reporting by exception and generating insights

If you are managing your fleet via spreadsheets, there is no shortage of ways to assist in rolling up and visualising your key fleet data. But these reports can easily become overwhelming and hard to maintain, they add to the noise in your day-to-day management.

Managing a fleet’s day-to-day operations is a full workload as it stands, let alone trying to pick the key insights from within your reports. Reporting by exception and using your data to automatically generate reports can support your management decisions, allowing you to quickly identify key actionable insights you need to enable effective and cognisant decisions.

Reporting is not usually in the hands of a single individual either. Often there are staff at different levels in the organisation who require different snapshots of fleet operations. Privacy is an important consideration when providing this data to line managers, ensuring they only have visibility of their team, and not the whole organisation. This allows them to make cognisant decisions for their team– something Fleet Management software easily facilitates through multi-level permissions management.

Beyond the day-to-day management

Look beyond the day-to-day reporting and management of your fleet and you will find there is plenty more that can be achieved and managed via a fleet management software. If you are still managing your fleet via spreadsheets, it’s time to explore the operational and cost benefits your organisation will experience through implementing a dedicated solution.

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