As you start the new year, you likely have a fresh set of goals to attain and a budget to work within to achieve them. While fleets and parts rooms are the backbones of many thriving organizations, they are also large cost centers. A comprehensive fleet and asset management software, such as collectiveFleet®, will help you identify trends and manage your budget more effectively by allowing you to do the following:
- Better Manage Parts and Inventory
- Decrease Unplanned Maintenance and Downtime
- Take Advantage of Warranty Work
- Determine the Optimal Time to Replace/Sell Vehicles
- Comply with Safety Regulations (and reduce fines!)
Better Manage Parts and Inventory
Effectively managing your parts room inventory means you can make accurate forecasts on what parts are needed and when. Controlling parts inventory is an important key to making sure you stay on budget. If you do not have the parts you need, your fleet will have more downtime. However, if you have too much inventory, you might have little budget left for much-needed training on that newly acquired piece of specialized equipment.
Efficient management of parts could be a big opportunity to save money for your operation. Use your fleet management software to control stock levels, re-ordering, purchase orders, and everything related to your parts inventory. Armed with data about scheduled preventative maintenance and other repairs, you can reduce inventory levels to your optimum needs to make sure the needed parts are always on the shelf. Additionally, use your fleet management software to track all your core parts inventory. Small parts are often misplaced (or not tracked) and are overlooked when tracking inventory costs. Your comprehensive fleet management software can help you avoid having to make duplicate purchases because you have a system in place to keep track of them.
Further leverage your fleet and asset management software by integrating barcodes into your parts room. You’ll be more efficient with inventory management with accurate counts and less data entry. No more paper lists and spreadsheets!
Decrease Unplanned Maintenance and Downtime
Your fleet’s health is critical to your operation’s bottom line—downtime not only leads to costly repairs but also affects productivity. One of the major advantages of fleet management software is the tracking of repairs and ability to perform preventative maintenance. As you manage key performance indicators, fleet management software will automatically alert your team to take action when needed.
Stay up-to-date with maintenance by planning repairs and downtime effectively. Track things like vehicle location, fuel management, and other planned maintenance. collectiveFleet® can be used to improve communication and streamline workflow so that maintenance can be done proactively when it works best for your fleet’s schedule.
Take Advantage of Warranty Work
Have you ever purchased a replacement part or performed maintenance only to later realize that the part was still under warranty? You should be able to easily identify where you might capture warranty dollars by using notifications and maintaining warranty records for parts tracked in your fleet management software system. Below are just a few ways that a comprehensive fleet management software like collectiveFleet® can help with warranty recovery:
- A simple way to computerize all your warranty records that are associated with every piece of equipment, parts, or work performed in the fleet.
- When performing Work Orders, the user will receive a notification that the part or equipment may be under warranty.
- View all warranty information for all equipment and parts under one task list screen.
- Be notified when a piece of equipment’s warranty is about to expire and send it in for a quick inspection to see if any issues are covered by warranty.
- A re-capture report showing exactly how much has been saved.
Determine the Optimal Time to Replace/Sell Vehicles
Efficient budget management for your fleet operation goes well beyond day-to-day personnel, maintenance, parts, and repair costs. Eventually, you will have assets you need to replace. A solid fleet management system can forecast asset end-of-life and help you build your future budget. With collectiveFleet®, you can design an Asset Condition Scorecard for the vehicles in your fleet. The scorecard quickly shows measured data like age, meter, asset condition, maintenance schedules, repairs, and reliability. You can design a scorecard for each that shows management stats at-a-glance on any asset in the fleet. This is a helpful tool when having those difficult replace versus buy conversations with management.
Comply with Safety Regulations
Failing to pass safety inspections or comply with regulations can be another challenge to keeping your fleet on budget. Tracking vehicle maintenance, vehicle inspections and driver certifications can be a full-time job. With a comprehensive fleet management software, you can set reminders and alerts to never miss a vehicle inspection date or driver re-certification again. You can even setup alerts for discrepancies – if an employee or piece of equipment assigned to a unit does not have the proper certifications to meet compliance requirements, you will receive a warning. Use your fleet management software to keep your fleet (and drivers) in compliance and operating safely.