There are lots of businesses out there who need to maintain a fleet of vehicles for their day to day operations. Proper fleet management will keep your costs to a minimum and ensure that you can always rely on your vehicles when you need them. Here are 3 tips for managing your business fleet more efficiently.
Tighten Up Your Training
As a business owner, you have ultimate responsibility for your workers’ safety when they’re driving your vehicles. Don’t wait for someone to get into an accident or for other issues to crop up before you begin training employees how to best avoid them. It is much better to be proactive and to devise a comprehensive training programme that includes both safety and maintenance advice that ensures your vehicles are being looked after properly.
Stay on Top of Your Admin
Depending on the specific details of the arrangement between you and your employees, you might have cars returned to your business vehicle lot at the end of every day, or your workers might take them home with them. In some cases, your workers will also use these vehicles as their personal vehicles. Regardless of what those arrangements might be, it pays to stay on top of them and ensure that you and your employees are all sticking to the agreement that you made.
You will also want to ensure that all your vehicles are being properly maintained. Staying on top of this maintenance is significantly easier when all your admin is in order and up to date. Keeping log books detailing what maintenance work has been completed and when makes it easy to see what tasks need to be carried out.
Another important thing to stay on top of is your insurance. Any business that is responsible for a number of vehicles will usually want to opt for fleet insurance over insuring each vehicle individually, which is likely to be far more expensive. You can keep the costs of a fleet insurance policy down by using a price comparison website such as Quotezone: https://www.quotezone.co.uk/fleet-insurance.
Choose the Right Vehicles
Choosing the right vehicles for your business fleet will have a big impact on how easy or difficult you find it to manage and maintain them. It will also affect the experience that your employees have – if you don’t give them vehicles that are suitable for their roles, it’s going to hamstring their performance.
You should also consider the operating costs of your fleet; some vehicles are much more expensive to keep filled with petrol and properly maintained, whereas others are far more efficient. Of course, there are always trade-offs involved – vehicles with lower operating costs tend to be smaller, which limits their potential uses. Conversely, vehicles that are bigger and more expensive to run can offer more storage space inside. The best vehicles for your fleet will depend on the specific of your business, so this isn’t a decision that you should rush into.
Staying on top of your admin and keeping your vehicles in perfect working order will save you money in the long run as it will reduce the amount of vehicle maintenance that you need to pay for later on. If you don’t, operating a fleet of vehicles can become prohibitively expensive.
