Improving Your Fleet Time Management

In This Article

What’s Taking Up Your Time?
Vehicle Management
Driver Management
Administrative Tasks
What Can I Do About It?

What’s Taking Up Your Time?

What if there was an easy way to improve your company’s fleet time management? If you’re the person responsible for managing your company’s fleet, you’re certainly familiar with all of the day-to-day hassles that make their way on to your plate. In fact, it can often seem like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get anything else done. If that sounds familiar, don’t despair. There are easy solutions to all of these challenges. In fact, partnering with a fleet management company could be just the cure you’re looking for.

Vehicle Management

One of the most time-consuming aspects of managing a fleet is dealing with the assets themselves. It all starts with vehicle acquisition. You have to take time to spec out the vehicles to your exact needs, locate available units, negotiate with the sellers, complete all of the paperwork, and arrange delivery. It’s a tedious process. It’s even worse if your drivers are geographically dispersed. Instead of conducting business with a local seller, you’re now in contact with sellers in multiple states, often times with your driver acting as a middle-man (taking time away from their core responsibilities). The entire process can take a tremendous amount of time to complete.

Once you’ve acquired the vehicles, you’re now responsible for coordinating maintenance and repairs. This is difficult enough if your fleet is comprised of a single manufacturer or vehicle type. It’s even more burdensome when you have a mixture of vehicles, all with different service schedules and maintenance requirements. In fact, many fleets have found this task to be so time consuming that they end up hiring an individual for the sole purpose of coordinating maintenance and vehicle repairs.

Finally, when it comes time to replace your units, you then have to spend time determining how best to dispose of the outgoing vehicles. Do you trade it in to a dealership, offer it to your employees, or put a sign in the window and park it at the front of your building? How do you determine your asking price? Tracking the used-vehicle market can be a full-time job in itself.

Driver Management

Just in case managing the vehicles wasn’t time consuming enough, fleet managers can also spend an inordinate amount of time managing the drivers themselves.

Whether it’s organizing training, enforcing vehicle policy compliance, arranging alternative transportation in the event of mechanical issues, investigating accidents, or catering to special requests, each driver in your fleet presents their own unique set of issues for you to deal with. All of those emails and phone calls wind up occupying a significant portion of your day.

Administrative Tasks

In addition to the mountains of paperwork that accompany every car purchase and sale, fleet managers are also responsible for ensuring that all ancillary administrative tasks are handled correctly and in a timely manner.

You have vehicles with registrations renewing at different times, in different locations, all with their own set of rules, procedures, and fees. Some renew every year, others every two or three. Some states require inspections, other don’t. Keeping it straight can become a nightmare, especially when a single mistake can have severe consequences for you, your driver, and your company.

You may think that deploying a reimbursement program would solve this issue, however, that’s not the case. Reimbursement carries its own set of administrative headaches to deal with. There are expense reports to comb through, mileage logs to reconcile, and reimbursement checks to process and issue. When taking into account all of the drivers in your fleet, a reimbursement program requires a significant time investment to administer.

What Can I Do About It?

It may seem like handling all of these tasks is just something that accompanies having company vehicles on the road. Fortunately, that isn’t the case. If managing your fleet is taking up a significant amount of time, it may be worth considering enlisting help from a professional fleet management company like Motorlease.

Motorlease recognizes the amount of time that managing a fleet occupies and offers custom-designed programs to take as many or as few of those burdens off of your shoulders as you’d like. Whether it’s vehicle acquisition, disposition, registration, maintenance, insurance, fuel, telematics, or driver training, Motorlease has programs to fit your company’s unique needs.

With fleet management services from Motorlease, you can get out of the car business and back to focusing on your core responsibilities.