Simplifying Your Fleet Management: A Guide For Growing SMEs
For businesses across a range of sectors, having company vehicles, such as motorcycles, cars, vans or even lorries, can be vital for everyday operations. Even businesses that could outsource deliveries might consider bringing this service in-house if they struggle to get the service they expect.
When you’re running a small business with a few vehicles, fleet management might not seem important. However, as you grow, you’ll need to be aware of where your vehicles are and what they’re doing to ensure that you always manage them efficiently and get the most out of your company’s assets.
Buying vehicles through a company comes with many costs, including taxes and additional fees, so if your business is growing, you might need to start managing your vehicles to ensure you get the most out of them. After all, you don’t want to be wasting money on a fleet that isn’t meeting your needs or performing efficiently. You also need to be wary of theft or misuse, particularly as your company grows.
Manually logging vehicles in and out of garages and checking them physically can be time-consuming, which takes you away from your important role as a leader. Thankfully, there are plenty of simple ways to streamline your fleet management and ensure that it meets the needs of your growing SME.
Follow Your Fleet Digitally
Digital fleet management software can help you to see where your vehicles are at any given time, meaning that you can find them even if sign-out procedures aren’t followed correctly and if a vehicle is presumed missing. These tools are also valuable for reviewing vehicle performance, optimising routes and reassuring customers. Explore fleet tracking options to find ones that work for your business and can scale up as you grow.
Use Key Management Solutions To Keep Track Of Vehicles
With multiple vehicles that are shared between several team members, it can be tough to know what is where. While vehicle tracking can help, if the asset is being cleaned or out of service, then it might be physically at your base but unavailable for use. Key management solutions from KEYper Systems can allow you to ensure that your vehicle keys and paperwork are kept safe and that you know where they are when you need them the most.
Automate Maintenance Details
Any company vehicle needs to be well-maintained to ensure the safety of your staff, customers and other road users. That means going above and beyond the legal requirement and conducting regular checks. Also, if any issues are reported by your staff, you need to make sure these are logged correctly and reviewed. Some fleet tracking tools will also offer maintenance and management support, so see if you can combine everything you need into one software product. You’ll then be able to save effort and ensure that your vehicles are always fully MOT’d and completely safe at all times.
Managing a fleet of vehicles isn’t as challenging as it might seem, but even if you only have a few cars at the moment, you need to build a process now to ensure that as you grow your company fleet, you have everything under control. These tips should help you get started and find the solutions you need to save time and manage your fleet effectively.
