Maximise Uptime With Fleet Management

Fleet management requires consistent diligence in order to discover new ways for your fleet to maximise efficiency, productivity and profits. A key element across all fleet management techniques is to maximise your fleet’s uptime.

Fleet managers can use multiple methods to combat wasteful downtime, including monitoring your vehicles and drivers, ensuring you have the right tools for the job and working to increase fuel efficiency.

Choosing The Right Vehicles

The older a vehicle gets, the higher the risk of unexpected breakdowns and increased downtime. This concern is the most notable reason why vehicles will be rotated out of an existing fleet line-up and replaced. Therefore, when you wish to expand your fleet or replace a current unit, you should revisit the needs of your current operations and consider the potential future of your fleet’s works. For example, if your portfolio of work is growing, you may need larger vehicles or ones specifically suited to a task, such as HGVs for frozen goods.

A growing business is always great, but you must ensure your fleet can handle this increased workload. Vehicle overloading is a serious concern that can cause permanent damage to your vehicles and is a leading cause of unscheduled maintenance. Additionally, overloading can decrease your road safety. When these large vehicles are loaded beyond their intended weight limit, it will increase the vehicle’s inertia and increase the required braking distance significantly.

As your operations grow and demand increases, you should always consider your vehicle’s capabilities and, if necessary, invest in their replacement to better suit your needs. This enables you to manage an adequate fleet of reliable vehicles that won’t compromise your operations with undesirable downtime.

Pro-active Preventative Maintenance

Being proactive about your maintenance plans demands you monitor the condition of your vehicles with a regular preventative maintenance program. Reacting to immediate maintenance will present you with erratic downtime that will harm your delivery schedule. Preventative maintenance is the key to eliminating this issue and ensuring you always have faith in your fleet’s equipment and delivery vehicles.

The essence of preventative maintenance for commercial fleets involves instituting a regular program of checks so that any potential issues can be flagged early and be pre-emptively fixed. Conducting maintenance this way prevents problems from building to critical levels that will put a vehicle out of action, creating massive disruptions for your operations and leaving you with nothing but downtime.

Before each working day, an HGV driver can take the time to assess the condition of their vehicle quickly. This can involve checking tyre pressure, trailer connections, noting down millage and anything else relevant to the vehicle’s safety, such as anti-freeze levels in winter. These checks will assist in understanding the vehicle’s exact condition and deciding which they wish to replace, helping increase the driver’s safety.

Embrace New Technologies

New technologies are being developed annually to improve commercial fleet operations. These cover a broad range of options from fleet monitoring metrics, fuel monitoring software and online fuel management. These systems are digitising the task of running a fleet and making it possible for managers to have complete control over operations remotely.

There is a predicted bright future for fleet management systems. With the new year coming, there is a growing focus on providing effective computer systems that eliminate human error in documenting information and providing essential data for analysis so managers can find any areas of their operations that are lacking. In addition, moving to wireless systems that can be accessed from any location is an excellent way of reducing downtime to minimal levels and potentially removing it altogether.

Beneficial Onsite Fuel Management

Fuel is the leading resource a commercial fleet needs to operate, but it is also the most significant source of wasted time for many fleets. Commercial fleets that rely upon forecourt fill-ups with fuel cards run into increasing delays as their drivers will need to spend time out of every delivery finding fuel. Whilst this may not be considered downtime, it certainly negatively impacts running an efficient operation.

Investing in onsite fuel storage tanks connected to a fuel management system removes this issue and increases your fleet’s uptime. This is accomplished because you would have complete control over your fleet’s fuel, a resource that can be shared with your drivers before they leave your site and provides them with the ability to pursue the most efficient routes to their destination and back, reducing delivery times and making your estimates more appealing to customers than your competitors.

Fuel management has additional benefits than the convenience of refuelling onsite. For example, you can buy fuel wholesale rather than one tank at a time. Of course, this is only possible with a fuel tank installed at your premises, but once you have it, you can buy bulk fuel at significantly lower prices. This offers a bonus of maximising your uptime and reducing expenses so you can reallocate funds into other areas such as exploring new technologies, preventative maintenance or replacing vehicles.

At Fueltek, we specialise in providing highly effective fuel management, monitoring and storage solutions that will significantly improve your fleet’s efficiency, allowing you more time to focus on maximising your fleet’s uptime. Browse our selection of superior fuel storage, monitoring and management solutions online today.