Ensuring visibility along every stage of the vehicle lifecycle is the ultimate but elusive goal for most fleet management companies. From acquisition to remarketing or disposal, understanding the current stage of the vehicle in whatever lifecycle stage it’s in is the first step towards digitally transforming your fleet organization. Increased visibility of your end-to-end vehicle lifecycle will enhance operational efficiency and increase client satisfaction.
Why Visibility Matters for Fleet Management
Every stage of a vehicle’s lifecycle matters for your clients’ fleets. A comprehensive approach to fleet management ensures your company efficiently and effectively manages all aspects of this lifecycle to deliver the best results possible for your client:
- Maximized operational efficiency
- Minimized costs
- Compliance with regulations
- Improved client experience
Today, vehicle information is trapped within IT and partner system siloes. No single source of truth exists for all data, regardless of the vehicle’s lifecycle stage. Collecting only the most critical information from each system and putting it into a visibility platform is all that’s needed to bridge information siloes and see the entire picture. Vital information, including VIN, expected delivery date, and current location, for instance, will populate a master visibility screen to become the basis for vehicle supply chain tracking from ordering to shipping to upfitting and eventual delivery to the customer.
Ensuring End-to-End Visibility at All Levels
Comprehensive visibility enables fleet management companies to identify areas for process improvement and adjust as necessary, ensuring teams allocate resources appropriately and focus their energies on value-added efforts.
Today, FMCs are doing this work manually. Teams of dozens of people are tasked with copying and pasting information from one system into shared spreadsheets that are frequently inaccurate and updated only once a week. Automating the integration with API calls allows the combined and normalized data to be integrated automatically, keeping all needed business information current, with higher accuracy and lower costs because the manual aspects are eliminated.
Integrating siloed vehicle lifecycle data leads to better decision-making, increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved fleet overall performance.
Below, we explore how gathering, maintaining, and analyzing data points within each stage of the vehicle lifecycle ensures optimum performance.
1. Acquisition
The vehicle lifecycle begins long before it’s on the road. The acquisition is the first critical step to ensuring high-level visibility for fleet management operations.
Today’s FMCs have long-established processes for ordering vehicles from different auto manufacturers, contracts with multiple vehicle delivery companies for picking up and delivering vehicles from the car manufacturer, and numerous upfitters with various customization options per kind of car. All of these have independent systems. Tying together the systems with the business-critical information requires visibility from the date a vehicle is ordered, including when each vendor expects to complete their part of the order, upfitting, and delivery process.
Pizza delivery companies can show their customers when the pizza is out of the oven and on its way, yet a car costing tens of thousands of dollars does not provide such a view. With visibility, customers see where and when they will receive the vehicles.
2. Commissioning
Once a vehicle is acquired, fleet management teams must ensure it meets regulations and requirements. Ensure all necessary documents, including registration, licensing, and insurance, are in place and easily accessible. These systems work independently and exclusively from the others. Visibility allows teams to monitor the process to ensure each vehicle meets operational requirements.
3. Operation
Once the vehicle is with the customer, visibility connects the multiple systems used to monitor the vehicle health. Fleet management systems offer real-time vehicle monitoring and driver evaluation. GPS and telematics systems to monitor vehicle locations, routes, and usage in real-time. Driver behavior tracking and performance, including speed, braking patterns, and route adherence, use another system.
Visibility with normalized data means that FMC customers can look in a single place to get a complete view of the state of the vehicle rather than logging into a tracking system, cabin monitoring system, fuel card system, and others.
4. Maintenance
Most fleets use a maintenance tracking system. Keeping detailed maintenance service histories and integrating the cost of maintenance and repairs into a universal vehicle overview lets you see the utilization rates on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis and compare them to the cost of operations to create a blended ROI for each vehicle.
5. Telematics and Monitoring
Data collection for every aspect of vehicle operations is essential for increasing visibility. Data on vehicle performance, fuel consumption, engine diagnostics, and other vital metrics gives a complete picture of each vehicle, allowing you to address potential maintenance issues and maximize a vehicle’s operational timeline.
6. Compliance and Safety
Safety is a top priority for every fleet management company and its clients. Keeping track of all regulatory requirements and ensuring that vehicles and drivers comply with relevant laws and regulations is crucial to long-term safety and business success.
Frequently, these safety-related issues are tracked and captured in IT systems. Integrating with the safety monitoring systems allows FMCs to see safety information by vehicle type and driver across multiple vehicles. The flexibility to correlate these statistics is critical to integrating every data stream for clear visibility.
7. Cost Management
The bottom line matters in managing fleets. Increased visibility across vehicle lifecycles allows for better cost management because teams can
- Track expenses
- Identify resource waste and cost inefficiencies
- Streamline and consolidate operations to reduce spending
Establishing a high-level view of all fleet expenses, including fuel, maintenance, insurance, and administrative costs, helps identify areas for cost reduction, benefiting your business and your clients.
8. Remarketing and Disposal
Regardless of the quality of the vehicle or your preventative maintenance practices, every asset will come to the end of its lifecycle. Monitoring the condition and performance of vehicles allows fleet management companies to determine the optimal time for retirement or sale, ensuring the greatest ROI on the initial investment.
9. Review and Improvement
Finally, it’s time to evaluate all your collected data to identify areas for improvement. Use dashboards and reports to visualize KPIs and track progress toward your organizational goal. These insights can help you implement changes and improvements in your fleet management business.
Optimizing End-to-End Fleet Management with Ridecell
Vehicle lifecycle visibility is critical to improving operational efficiency and the client experience. Collecting and organizing the above data points increases visibility from start to finish.
Ridecell provides fleet management companies with the tools to help them achieve their goals. Ridecell Visibility continuously surfaces insights, enhancing your business at every stage of the vehicle lifecycle. The Ridecell platform helps you.
- Blueprint Processes – Generate the process map of your vehicle lifecycle to evaluate workflows from purchase to remarketing.
- Uncover Blind Spots – Complete end-to-end process and data visibility identifies bottlenecks and their root causes.
- Gain Real-Time Intelligent Insights – Facilitate the generation of AI-assisted insights with data from internal and vendor systems.
- Improve the Client Experience – Provide clients with a unified view of their fleet status—from delivery to in-use insights.
Ridecell provides the platform your company needs to orchestrate, normalize, and visualize all the data in your clients’ fleets so you can optimize your performance and fleet vehicle lifecycles. Every data point throughout the vehicle lifecycle is clear, organized, and in one location, empowering your teams with the knowledge and understanding to bring better insight into your business.