Every fleet manager wants to reduce costs. Yet how do you work out where in your operation you can save without lowering productivity? This guide is here to help. Here, we break down the key factors that negatively impact your bottom line, from poor driver behaviour to wear and tear. And we give you a user-friendly tool to quickly calculate where you can make savings right away.
What’s putting pressure on your budget?
Your fleet costs can be divided into two categories: variable and fixed. Fixed costs, like depreciation and interest, are necessary parts of owning vehicles and there’s little you can do to avoid them. Variable costs, on the other hand, are within your ability to manage. Here are some of the most pressing variable costs and how they affect your business.
Driver behaviour
There are lots of ways your drivers can unnecessarily add to your costs. Constantly accelerating and decelerating, speeding, going around corners too fast – all of these use more fuel than necessary.
Wear and tear
Driver behaviour also plays a part in another factor that can put pressure on your budget: the health of your vehicles. Acceleration, harsh braking and slow gear changing all take their toll on various parts of a vehicle. Regular, scheduled maintenance is essential to identifying issues before they become major problems that can lead to downtime.
Mileage
The more your vehicles drive, the higher your fuel costs. Trying to counter this is difficult. While you don’t want your vehicles to clock up unnecessary mileage, you also don’t want to lose productivity.
Insurance
All the above factors can also have an impact on your insurance premium. When an insurer sees evidence of vehicle damage or reckless driving, this may be reflected in the amount you have to pay to keep your business on the road.
How can a fleet management solution help?
Fleet management solutions give you increased visibility over how your vehicles are being used and managed. This data helps you to take steps to reduce your total cost of ownership with greater effectiveness and confidence. For example, you can monitor driver behaviour to see if your team are using the vehicles in ways that are wasting fuel. You can get better visibility over traffic, to avoid costly jams and get to your destinations in the soonest time. And you can setup automatic alerts in your system to ensure vehicles are getting timely, scheduled maintenance, avoiding downtime and costly repairs.
Want to get clear idea of precisely how much money you can save using TomTom Telematics’ Webfleet solution? Then try out our Savings Calculator.
Find out how much you can save in seconds
The TomTom Telematics Savings Calculator is an easy-to-use tool that shows you exactly how much you could save in seconds. You simply fill in the number of vehicles in your fleet, your average mileage and the type of fuel you use. It comes back with a complete overview of your potential savings and payback period.
As well as giving you a realistic expectation of how a fleet management solution can help your business, it also gives you a detailed breakdown to show other decision makers in your company why investment in this area is worthwhile.
Don’t let unnecessary costs hold back your business growth. Find out how much you can save today.