Better Fleet Management: What the Big Dogs Can Teach Growing Fleets
By Verlen Larsen
Whether it’s an unknown football team defeating an established champion or a newcomer athlete knocking an unbeatable opponent off their pedestal, we all love rooting for the plucky underdog with heart. But you’re not an underdog anymore. Now that you’ve grown your fleet to 20-200 vehicles, you’re steadily racing to the front of the pack.
As your fleet continues to grow, how can you stay true to your roots, boost your bottom line, and improve efficiency and fleet management? Read on for tips on how to run your fleet like the big dogs.
It Pays to Be Strategic About Fleet Maintenance
No one likes seeing their money circling the drain, especially hard-working owner/operators who are putting everything on the line to grow their trucking business. Now’s the time to take proactive measures to avoid costly fleet maintenance mistakes, like installing new tires right before disposing of an asset.
If you aren’t already doing so, monitor the wear rates of your truck components to be more strategic about maintenance.
- If you plan to keep a tractor for an additional 80,000 miles, set aside a budget to avoid changing tires for the remaining lifecycle.
- If your current wear rates indicate that the tires have 100,000 miles left on them, assign the truck to a freight lane or driver with higher utilization.
- If the tires only have 70,000 miles remaining, assign the truck to a driver or area with lower utilization to stretch your maintenance budget.
Technology Simplifies Truck Driver Retention
As fleets get busier, sometimes they lose that personal touch, and their truck driver turnover rate rises. Your business will evolve and change over time, but you don’t have to sacrifice your culture as you grow.
Here are a few ideas to help you hold on to good drivers as your fleet evolves:
Get Transflo’s Fleet Profitability guide for more tips to help you retain drivers and boost revenue.
Get the Fleet Profitability Guide
You Can Do More With Telematics Technology
Know Where You Stand
While constantly comparing yourself to other fleets isn’t productive, you need to know how you stack up. Through Transflo’s partnership with Geotab, you can benchmark and measure your fleet’s performance compared to similar operators based on aggregated data from more than 2.8 million vehicles globally.
Leverage Driver Scorecards
Many larger fleets use their telematics data to track driver performance and identify high-risk drivers and top performers. With these stats in the palm of your hand, you can have more meaningful conversations with your drivers and foster some healthy competition. Ask your telematics provider to add additional metrics around productivity, efficiency, fleet safety, and compliance vs. relying on the standard metrics.
Automate Paperwork & Protect Drivers
Did you know that you can automate routine paperwork with geofences? Depending on your solution, you may be able to create a geofence around a shipper’s location in your telematics portal. Once the truck enters the geofence, a remittance is automatically emailed to the customer, broker, or consignee. Geofences can also be used to alert fleet safety personnel when a driver enters a dangerous neighborhood.
Reduce Paper & Get Paid Faster
When your fleet was small, you likely got a lot done through pen and paper. As you grow, paper becomes a liability. Paper documents can be lost or destroyed, and they add work for drivers and back-office staff. The right fleet management solution automates paper processes and digitizes (scans) documents to your document-management and TMS system, so you can reduce hassles and get paid faster.
For more genius ways to use your data, watch the on-demand webinar below.
