Improve Processes with Fleet Management Automations

As a fleet manager, your responsibilities may be endless but your bandwidth is finite. To stay on top of everything that demands your attention, it's vital that you spend your time effectively. That means devoting serious hours to strategizing your fleet's future while not letting day-to-day administrative tasks slide in the process.

Fleet management automation can help shoulder the burden of tedious tasks so you have more time to focus on matters only you can tackle. Between sparing you from manual data entry and acting as an extra pair of eyes looking out for your assets, fleet management automation can provide a productivity boost that benefits both your employer and yourself.

Here are three ways to automate your fleet:

1. Repair order management

If your fleet ever uses shops for maintenance or repair work, you know how time-consuming logging that activity can be. To have an accurate record of your spending, you have to transfer every line item of every invoice you receive into a document you can reference in the future. And no matter how fast you can type or copy and paste, all that manual data entry will eat up a significant portion of your time.

Fortunately, automation can spare you from all that hassle. Certain fleet management systems (FMSs) have partnerships with repair shops that enable fleets to manage their third-party maintenance entirely within the platform. That enables all service details (down to the line item) to be captured automatically.

Additionally, automation can also accelerate repair order approvals by eliminating the need for you to give the green light to work via phone calls or emails. Instead, you can set up auto-approvals for work under specified cost thresholds performed by shops you trust. That way the shop doesn’t have to wait for you to respond before they can get to work on your assets and you don’t have to disrupt your day over marginal expenses you would sign off on in all instances. Ultimately, automation allows you to resolve issues faster while giving you more time to focus on other important tasks.

2. Parts inventory management

Maintaining a well-stocked parts inventory is essential for minimizing unplanned downtime, but keeping up-to-date inventory counts by hand can be a ton of work. And should you ever fail to reorder a needed part in time, the financial consequences of missing work and paying for expedited shipping can be severe.

Automated fleet management software can alleviate the pains of parts inventory management from two directions. First, instead of having to manually update a cell in a spreadsheet every time you use a part, FMSs can automatically update your inventory counts after a part is added to a work order. In addition to saving you time, this setup also improves inventory count accuracy by reducing the likelihood of forgetfulness throwing off your parts totals.

Automation can also make parts inventory management easier by alerting you when your supply of a part passes a specified threshold. By automatically giving you a heads-up well before any risk of a stockout, these notifications enable you to keep your parts inventory prepared for any scenario without having to monitor it to an excessive degree.

3. Preventive maintenance scheduling

Planning your service work in advance makes staying on top of your asset’s maintenance needs a whole lot easier. But knowing what service actions to perform and when to perform them can be difficult if you’re relying on instinct alone.

Luckily, certain FMSs can make developing optimal preventive maintenance (PM) schedules simple by automatically displaying recommendations from OEMs. This not only saves you the time of having to look up these recommendations yourself, but also ensures that your PM schedules are based on the best data available.

And just like with parts inventory thresholds, many FMSs are capable of sending you email or text reminders when maintenance work will soon be due. These heads-ups allow your technicians to prioritize their workloads accordingly so the long-term health of your assets never gets put on the back burner.

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