Fleet Data Collection Management
In basic terms, fleet management concerns the organization and proper coordination of commercial motor vehicles such as cars, vans, trucks, specialist vehicles, and forklifts or private vehicles used for work purposes by the business, ships, and rail cars.
Fleet management itself seeks to cover a wide range of functions such as vehicle leasing and financing, licensing, maintenance, supply chain management, telematics, driver management, fuel management, and accident management.
The ultimate aim of a well organized fleet management system is to reduce the overall costs of maintaining a fleet of vehicles while simultaneously maximizing the profits and benefits sourced from maintaining a fleet by improving efficiency and productivity.
Benefits of Proper Fleet Data Collection Management
A good process for fleet management helps you run a very efficient operation. Some of the advantages include:
1. Better vehicle utilization – Accurate and real-time knowledge of all aspects and histories of the vehicles within your fleet can help expedite the process of improvements in utilization. This includes how they were being allocated and used.
2. Improved driver profiling – Gives you proper and in-depth information about the drivers you employ, helping you create risk profiles and identify areas which training has failed to address. Information like these can help your fleet reduce accidents and insurance costs.
3. Enhanced parts management and reduced fuel consumption – The accurate knowledge of parts and stocks eliminates overstocking, increases workshop productivity, and reduce inventory costs. Data regarding fuel costs, consumption, and emissions also come in handy when analyzing performance and ensuring compliance with emissions regulations.
4. Improved maintenance and repair – Provides a much better insight into data detailing repair times and workshop productivity which in turn helps you assess the productivity of your maintenance teams. It also identifies where long term improvements may be made, helping you reduce overall costs and downtime.
Basic Metrics For Tracking Fleet Data
Maintaining a fleet of vehicles means a lot of data feed into your MRP system, data that needs to be classified and grouped.
Odoo Fleet makes this quite easy due to the extensive features suited for the intricacies of fleet data collection but despite that, here are some of the data metrics that you must consider as you collect and analyze the data:
1. Basic costs – Helps you identify vehicles that cost the most to operate and maintain.
2. Fuel economy – Helps you keep track of how much fuel a vehicle is consuming as opposed to how much it was expected to consume. Many vehicles tend to suffer drops in fuel economy as they age but timely maintenance can rectify this issue and even save money.
3. Maintenance tracking – Helps you determine if the maintenance team is doing their job of performing preventative maintenance properly and also record issues with the vehicles along with the frequency of issues to create a comprehensive vehicle repair history that you can later refer to.
4. Lifecycle and accident costs – Helps you closely track the overall costs and benefits of maintaining a vehicle, both monetarily and qualitatively. This information will help you decide whether it is time to resell the vehicle or keep it. You should also keep close track of a vehicle’s accident history and the costs of repairs as this information will undoubtedly help you identify root causes which in turn will make solving those problems for the long term much easier.
5. Asset utilization and labor-parts costs – Helps you identify vehicles that are being underutilized and determine whether the cost of labor is justified by the parts being replaced, repaired and installed.
Managing all this will turn out to be a dizzying headache if you try to manage with spreadsheets and papers.
The amount of time, energy, and effort that would be required is monumental, and it won’t be required just from you.
In order to have a comprehensively data-driven fleet without all these headaches, you better adopt a fleet management software or better yet, an MRP with a fleet management module like Odoo Fleet.
ODOO Fleet
Odoo Fleet is a free module for your Odoo MRP system.
It is fully integrated with other crucial modules such as Employees, Expenses, Projects, Manufacturing, and Accounting to provide you the most comprehensive data cluster for your fleet management needs.
Its robust set of features allow you to keep a close eye on your fleet through an user-friendly system that gives you easy access to essentials such as the fuel log, entries, and finance sheets.
You can also easily identify and trace the money spent by your company behind each and every vehicle in your fleet.
Odoo Fleet also prioritizes updating your accounts by automatically adding the costs of contracts such as leasing and services according to a specified frequency.
Costs for things like fuel and repairs are also added automatically to the final report.
Each and every contract for your vehicles are supervised by the module. You will receive visual reminders for renewing or ending your contracts in time, helping you output an overall increase in efficiency.
You may also set up vehicle and insurance policies for all your vehicles with the help of the module and manage the related invoices and notes.
Detailed analysis and reporting is indeed a shining feature of Odoo Fleet, showing you all costs associated with a specific vehicle, vehicle type, vehicle class, or costs involving a type of service.
The reporting tool helps you compare different types of costs and reach a well-informed conclusion on what to do next. Extremely helpful insights about the effective return of each vehicle improves your fleet investments as a whole.
In conclusion, proper fleet management with Odoo is a very hassle-free experience provided that you have good knowledge of the basic metrics and considerations typically involved, which this article is designed to give you anyway.
Syncoria is a digital transformation company based in Canada and is an official Odoo Ready partner.