Managing a fleet of trucks and transport vehicles for a business can be a very difficult task, especially if you do not have past experience with managing a fleet. But luckily there are many steps that you can take to ensure that you are keeping tabs on your fleet of vehicles.

Start building fleet management skills

While managing the business fleet will get easier with time and experience, there are some simple and basic things that you can do to start building your fleet management skills.  Some of the most fundamental things that you can do in managing your fleet include the following:

• Records, Records, Records.  Keeping records on everything surrounding the fleet and its drivers will be a critical first step in successfully managing your fleet.  First, you will want to keep a log and a record of that log for each vehicle on who was driving the vehicle and when.  You will also want to keep a record of the condition of the vehicle that includes its total mileage, condition, and routine service information with dates. All forms of records concerning the fleet should be kept both digitally and in hard-copy form to ensure that they are not lost.
• Keep tabs on the vehicles at all times.  While in the perfect work world every employee would be trustworthy and every claim by outsiders would be honest, that, unfortunately, is not the way of things. To protect the company from incidents involving a dishonest employee or a fraudulent claim by another company or individual, have each fleet vehicle equipped with a GPS monitoring unit to keep tabs on the vehicle at all times.
• Manage expenditures and routes to produce profits.  Every trip by a fleet vehicle will require the expenditure of fuel, and if the vehicle makes an empty run back to the loading docks than no money is being made while money is still being spent on fuel.  To mitigate the costs and boost profits, invest the time and effort into solid route planning and strict mileage regulations.

While there are many things that a new fleet manager will learn to better perform in their duties, those who are just beginning can have a solid place to start if they will strive to understand the above few points on basic fleet management.

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