No matter whether you’re a small business or a much larger and established company, the fleet costs of having a fleet of vehicles on-hand can be tremendous. It costs tons of money to buy these fleet vehicles, keep them maintained, handle any repairs that are needed, and fuel them for their journeys. Not to mention you have to pay the fleet managers and drivers a competitive salary in order to keep them with your company! That’s why we’ve created this handy article for you to learn a bit from. There are plenty of efficient ways for you to reduce fleet costs and improve the ROI of your fleet vehicles. Keep reading down below and you’re going to learn all about these methods and how you can implement them with your fleet.
1. Reducing The Fleet Size
One of the first ways to reduce costs of your fleet is to right-size the fleet. By keeping one vehicle in your fleet that you don’t require, you are spending thousands of dollars that you could otherwise be saving or spending on new and more important projects. Sure, when you reduce your fleet, you are going to be putting more of a workload on your remaining fleet vehicles. This is going to increase the operating costs of these vehicles slightly, but that is nothing when compared to the amount of savings you will be having when you take out fleet members.
Plus, do you really need all of those fleet vehicles? Most of the times, companies have to up their creativity and come up with a plan to increase productivity of the available fleet efficiently. See what you can do and you could be seeing tons of fleet costs savings in the future!
2. Cut Those Miles Traveled
The next thing that you need to think about when looking into fleet costs savings is to cut the miles traveled by your fleet vehicles. Now, this might not be something that you think you have any control over. However, that’s not exactly the case. No matter how much you trust your fleet drivers, there are definitely some non-business-related trips going on that could be costing your business money. Or there are too many stops being taken or the best routes are not being chosen to the final destination. This is something that you can easily solve with the extra supervision of your drivers. Be sure to have a talk with your fleet managers and supervisors so that they know how important it is that the number of miles traveled by fleet vehicles is kept to the absolute minimum. When you do this, you are going to be saving your business a ton of money.
3. Get More Miles Per Gallon
[pullquote]There are plenty of ways that you can improve the MPG that your fleet vehicles get.[/pullquote] When you don’t pay attention to your miles per gallon, you are going to be paying way more than you should for fuel. But what are they ways you can do that? First, you can look into downsizing the size of your fleet vehicles or reducing their workload. When you have a smaller vehicle or when you have a large vehicle carrying less weight, they are going to have a much higher fuel efficiency.
You can also invest in some new and innovative automotive technologies to help save money and get greater fuel efficiency. For example, there are plenty of hybrid and electric technologies available that could make your fleet much more energy efficient. The last thing that you should be doing is to modify your driver’s behavior. Those drivers that drive more recklessly or speed on highways are going to be expending a lot more fuel than those that drive more carefully.
4. Reduce Lifecycle Costs
When it comes to your fleet vehicles, many business owners believe that it’s a better deal to keep vehicles for as long as possible before replacing them. However, this is not good for the overall cost of the vehicle. When you keep running a vehicle well past its optimum lifecycle, you are going to be seeing a lot more potential breakdowns and repairs needed. In addition, older vehicles have lower fuel efficiency than those that are newer. Make sure to reduce lifecycle costs by replacing your vehicles on a regular timeline, rather than keeping them past their due lifetime.
5. Lower The Acquisition Cost
You should be making sure that you don’t acquire fleets solely based on the first cost that you see. Make sure that you spend time researching what the cost of a fleet vehicle should actually be and what you can do to negotiate that price down. Every single fleet manager knows that it’s crucial to negotiate the initial price of a fleet vehicle acquisition.
6. Assure Higher Resale Value
Of course, you’re going to have to sell your fleet vehicles sometime – you can’t keep them forever! That means that you should have a strong strategy for selling off your fleet vehicles and ensuring a high resale value so that you can get a good amount of money for your fleet vehicle. One of the best ways to do this is a have an employee buying program, where you can sell your vehicles to your employees. This is a great way to get the vehicles off of your hands and ensure that they are in good hands with your employees. Another important way that you can assure higher resale value is to only go with fleet vehicles that are in neutral colors. There are going to be more consumers on the market who are interested in neutral colors, rather than bright ones or fleet vehicles with designs on them.
7. Lower Those Crash Costs
One of the worst things that can happen to your fleet vehicles is that one of your drivers gets into a crash. Not only is this going to put the life of the driver at risk, but this is going to increase the odds that you will be paying out in tons of repairs when this happens. Make sure that each of your drivers goes through the proper safety training for driving a fleet vehicle before they get behind the wheel.
And there you have it! Each of these points is super important for you to keep in mind if you want to reduce your fleet costs and put those savings to more important things.
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7 Efficient Ways To Reduce Your Company’s Vehicle Fleet Costs
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