There is far more than meets the eye to successfully operating an efficient fleet of vehicles in any industry.
With all of the technologies now available to fleet managers and transport directors, it is imperative that your business is able to set realistic targets and monitor key performance indicators in order to achieve its goals.
What are KPIs for fleet management?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for fleet management bring forward indicators of fleet progress and help determine crucial areas of high performance and improvement. Monitoring specifically chosen fleet KPIs help fleet managers to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of daily fleet operations.
Implementation of fleet KPIs helps you to track performance between certain time periods, clearly demonstrating growth or highlighting the necessity for change. KPIs will allow you to pick out areas of inefficiency and set goals to boost fleet performance over time.
Why are fleet management KPIs important?
Without analysing key metrics from your fleet operations, it is virtually impossible to make improvements. As a fleet manager, you should have a clear understanding of what aspects of your operations are contributing to setbacks, either financially or operationally.
At present, there may be many flashing lights in terms of areas for improvement. For example, your damage-only accident rate may be at an all-time high or your fleet’s average fuel spend may be spiralling out of control. By observing quantifiable measurements, you can gain a clearer understanding of which figures need work and can then begin to identify the ways in which these figures can be improved.
Once a strategy is in place, fleet managers are able to use these initial figures to benchmark all future results. Being able to quantify fleet data serves to benefit the business from an internal and external perspective. These metrics can provide valuable business insight at a management level by unearthing fundamental problems within business operations and opening the gates to improvements.
The data produced by monitoring KPIs can also help your business to identify itself as a top performer and can be used to convince prospects that you are the right business to work with. Businesses that can demonstrate that they are serious about meeting targets position themselves in a positive light with customers, new and old.
How do fleet telematics help with KPIs?
In order to benefit from insights provided by KPI measurement, businesses must have access to the right tools in which to record and analyse data from the fleet.
Equally as important, these tools must be easy to use and easy to interpret as the sheer volume of data now available can mean that fleet managers get lost among the mountain of graphs and tables. With this being said, when looking to purchase fleet management or telematics solutions to monitor fleet KPIs, your goals and hopeful outcomes must be clearly communicated.
With this knowledge, we can then identify which KPIs will help you to achieve your business objectives and ensure that you can turn the data into valuable and actionable insights.
Our guide to fleet telematics explains how our software works in more detail and how they can help a range of industries meet KPIs.
Fuel consumption reductions
Fuel expenditure is a key contributor to the cost of running a fleet; therefore, it is vital that the correct KPIs are monitored. Idling time is a popular metric to measure due to its dramatic effect on MPG figures.
With Trakm8 fleet telematics, it is not only possible to obtain accurate idling times, but it is also easy to identify drivers who have the most impact on this figure. By establishing those who negatively impact idling figures, it is possible to educate drivers on how they can reduce idling when conducting their day-to-day duties.
Reducing fuel consumption and increasing MPG is also improved by monitoring poor driver behaviour events. Without installing telematics, monitoring fuel-thirsty actions, such as heavy acceleration and harsh braking, is almost impossible. Thanks to deep connectivity with the vehicle, it is possible to view the frequency of these harsh events and also to pinpoint which fuel inefficient activity triggered an alert.
You are then able to benchmark the frequency of these events as initiatives are put in place to establish smoother driving styles across the fleet. The reduction in poor driver behaviour events can then be used as a means of laying the foundations for a lower overall fuel spend.
For fleet managers, telematics also enables the monitoring of the average MPG across the fleet or for individual vehicles. This helps to identify a correlation between the reduction in poor driving behaviour events and an increased average MPG figure.
Improve fleet driver safety and reducing driver distraction
Fleet driver safety is another key priority, especially amongst large fleets where accidents can happen frequently. With an effective telematics solution, accident logs can be recorded automatically with first notification of loss (FNOL) algorithms, whereby fleet managers are notified when an installed device detects an impact.
Accident logs are automatically kept on file and the relevant strategy can be implemented, should the frequency of accidents be noticeably high. With stricter driving penalties frequently being put in place, businesses must ensure that they implement their own policies, such as mobile phone usage, in order to protect staff from sanctions and to ensure duty of care.
Mobile phone use behind the wheel has historically been a difficult metric to quantify; however, there are now tools which fleet managers can harness in order to decrease accident risk amongst their drivers. Advances in telematics cameras, which include driver-facing cameras, give transport managers the ability to carry out spot-checks by live-streaming footage from a vehicle’s cab.
Telematics cameras with advanced driver assistance (ADAS) features, such as distracted driving, will also alert a fleet manager if a driver uses a mobile phone while they are at the wheel, helping to improve driver behaviour.
Improve fleet productivity
Measuring the utilisation of vehicles allows fleet managers to determine whether assets are being over or underused, helping to boost fleet productivity. By measuring KPIs such as:
- Average monthly mileage
- Average number of deliveries per week
- Average load size
… fleet managers are rewarded with the insight required to optimise utilisation and increase the frequency of deliveries using the least amount of vehicles.
Vehicle fill is often a metric used by operators of distribution and logistics vehicles in order to ensure their vehicles are being used to their maximum potential. If conducting deliveries to locations in a close vicinity, fleet managers may learn that it could be more productive for the asset to return to the depot and refill once half the deliveries have been completed.
Route optimisation software from Trakm8 enables fleet managers to input information relating to delivery schedules, the number of available assets and even details such as package size and asset capacity. The system’s intelligent algorithms then calculate how deliveries can be completed with the least amount of vehicles and with the lowest mileage.
This not only has obvious benefits for vehicle utilisation but also for fuel spend and environmental impact of the fleet. Reducing the amount of vehicles required to fulfil schedules allows businesses to offer an increased number of available delivery slots and can leave you with the spare assets to take on new business.
Vehicle failure and preventative maintenance
Many businesses monitor the average time between unscheduled maintenance and repairs in order to identify problematic assets or vehicles which show signs of recurring faults.
Downtime and unplanned maintenance poses a substantial threat to running costs and the level of service your business is able to provide to customers, not to mention the operational frustration of implementing contingency plans when a vehicle does experience a breakdown.
By analysing, identifying and replacing or repairing troublesome assets, unexpected costs and disruptions to schedules are eliminated. In order to prevent vehicles undergoing unexpected maintenance, regular (if not daily) manual vehicle checks should be carried out.
Through a combination of a mobile app and the telematics unit’s diagnostic capabilities, fleet managers are able to record if checks are carried out and also identify vehicles with recurring issues.
Track important fleet management KPIs and performance metrics
Trakm8 provides telematics hardware and fleet management solutions to assist fleet managers in obtaining and understanding the data that their fleet vehicles and drivers produce.
Our online portal provides vehicle tracking alongside a multitude of handy features which give fleet managers a higher level of understanding about their fleet operations.
Our popular journey summary report provides details on:
- The start and end location for each journey
- Journey durations
- Distance travelled
- Idling time
- Speeding events
In addition, via a telematics unit installed into the vehicle, the portal is able to display driver behaviour faults such as harsh acceleration, heavy braking, and speeding. These incidents are logged along a live map but are also available in downloadable reports.
The portal makes easy work of creating custom reports, which can be broken down by driver, vehicle or predetermined groups. Besides daily, monthly or annual driver behaviour reporting functionality, trend graphs can be obtained in order to observe improvements or failings among the workforce or specific drivers.
Individual vehicle timesheets are also available via the portal or the Trakm8 Fleet Manager app. Vehicle timesheets are an ideal way to summarise employees’ working hours and are often used by businesses to monitor costs for wages, business and private mileage and as a guide to miles driven over a specific period of time. All reports can be downloaded directly into CSV and PDF formats for records keeping.
