Fleet management isn’t easy. Managing two or more employees (who’re operating their own trucks or taxis) can be extremely challenging. If you don’t effectively manage your company’s fleet, however, things could go terribly wrong. Fleet Managers who do not effectively manage their fleets typically incur unnecessary charges and expenses and have high staff turnover rates.
If you want to keep your fleet running smoothly, this post has you covered. In it, you will learn some useful tips that you can then apply to your business, in order to totally improve your fleet and the way that it is managed.
Monitoring Employees
You can’t always guarantee that the people you hire are going to drive well or behave responsibly. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes the case that fleet managers have to punish their employees for reckless driving and public endangerment or even theft. A good way to mitigate against these things is to install trucking dash cams in all of your fleet vehicles. The installation of cameras will make employees think twice before they do something irresponsible or illegal. You need to regularly watch the cameras (which you will be able to do from your computer) to make sure employees are being responsible.
Using cameras isn’t just a good way of monitoring your employees though, it is also a good way of ensuring that no harm comes their way and getting them out of trouble in case they find themselves involved in a road traffic accident. You can use the dash cam footage that you have collected from your vehicles to prove a driver’s innocence if they ever get involved in an accident that has been caused by another person’s negligence. Ensure the cameras you use to produce high-quality images.
Tracking Your Fleet
In addition to ensuring that you monitor your employees, you also need to track your fleet. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your drivers won’t steal. You need to treat every single one as though they were a thief. Doing this will help you to prevent your company from taking unnecessary losses. Tracking your fleet can help you to identify suspicious behavior and stop drivers from being able to offload stolen goods. In addition to monitoring drivers, building trackers into your trucks can be a good way of preventing them from being stolen by criminal gangs as well.
Obviously, whatever’s in the back of your trucks is going to be worth quite a bit of money if you are taking steps to protect it and have an entire fleet devoted to delivering it to customers. Because of this, you will become a target of criminal gangs. It’s not uncommon for criminal gangs to steal vans and trucks or hold them up, taking everything that’s inside. By tracking your fleet you will be able to spot suspicious and strange behavior so that you can then call the police and get them to go and check out what your vehicles are doing, preventing thefts from occurring.
Requiring Updates
If you want to be a good fleet manager then you need to know where your staff are at all times and what they are doing. Obviously, you can use tracking devices to find out where employees are but it’s also a good idea to invest in software that employees can use to tell you how many deliveries they have made. Identifying how many deliveries individual employees have made will help you to figure out which of your drivers are the best and should be given promotions or at least commended for their hard work. The best kind of equipment you can give employees are handheld delivery recording devices that allow employees to mark each delivery off of their list and collect signatures from customers.
Avoiding Theft
Your main priority as a fleet manager should be avoiding theft. As mentioned throughout this post theft is a big problem. A good way of protecting yourself from theft is by investing in insurance. Theft insurance will ensure that if items are stolen from your vans or trucks, you get compensated for them. In addition to theft insurance, you also need to make sure that employees are thoroughly, professionally vetted. Under no circumstances should you ever hire an employee who you have not performed a background check on. Not conducting background checks on employees could lead to you hiring an individual who poses a threat to your company and the products that it sells.
As a fleet manager, there are fleet management strategies and things you need to know. If you do not know the things listed here for example, your vehicles could be targeted by thieves or you could hire untrustworthy employees.