The need for efficient fleet management is growing across industries as businesses increasingly rely on fleets to support their operations. Whether it’s logistics, delivery services, or company vehicles, adopting technology-driven fleet management systems has become essential to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and stay competitive in a fast-evolving market.
Fleet operators must ensure that their fleets meet established key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of their business.
This blog will explore these critical KPIs and highlight how Cartrack solutions can empower your business to optimise fleet performance and achieve your goals.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements used to assess how effectively a company achieves its objectives and goals over time. In fleet management, metrics such as fuel efficiency, driver behaviour, and route optimisation, to name a few, are crucial for evaluating and improving overall fleet performance.
By monitoring these indicators, fleet operators gain valuable insights into their fleet’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to make informed decisions. This continuous tracking and improvement process ensures optimal fleet performance, helping businesses reduce costs, enhance productivity, and achieve their operational goals more effectively.
Let's explore the top KPIs for measuring fleet performance:
To run a successful business, you need to know how many vehicles in your fleet are operational at what time and how frequently they are in use. This knowledge helps you measure the required resources, including the number of drivers, the fuel used, and whether or not your business can meet deadlines.
Calculating fleet utilisation rate
To measure this metric, fleet managers must calculate the fleet utilisation rate. This is calculated by dividing the number of kilometres or hours a vehicle uses by the total available kilometres or hours.
Example calculation
For example, if a fleet of four vehicles is available for 8 hours a day (32 total hours), but two vehicles work 4 hours each, one works for 3 hours, and one works for 2 hours, the total usage is 13 hours. Here’s how the utilisation rate would be calculated:
Utilisation rate = 13hours/32 hours x 100 = 40.6%
Using the above method, the total fleet utilisation rate is 40.6%, meaning the fleet is underutilised. Fleet managers can then use this information to identify areas of improvement, which could be maintenance issues, poor route routing, or human behaviour.
However, if only 20 operational hours are required for that day, you can adjust your evaluation. In this case, using 13 out of 20 required hours means the fleet is operating at 65% of its needed capacity.
Adjusted utilisation rate = 13 hours/20 hours x 100 = 65%
This approach helps managers make better decisions to improve efficiency.
Managing driver performance is crucial for ensuring that fleets operate smoothly and cost-effectively. By tracking key driver data, fleet managers can identify areas for improvement, which will lead to enhanced safety, fuel efficiency, and productivity. Here are the key aspects of driver management:
By focusing on these key areas, fleet operators can enhance driver performance, resulting in a more efficient and cost-effective fleet.
Understanding maintenance costs is essential for operators, as it provides insights into both the time and expense required to repair a vehicle in the event of a breakdown. This metric plays a critical role in minimising downtime by helping anticipate how long a vehicle will be out of service, ensuring smoother operational planning.
Additionally, it helps in budgeting for future repairs, allowing operators to allocate resources effectively and avoid unexpected financial strain.
This metric measures the time fleet vehicles are unavailable for repairs or maintenance. Monitoring vehicle wear and tear helps fleet administrators identify areas for efficiency and cost reductions.
To calculate the average vehicle downtime, you need to add the total of all vehicles and then divide it by the total number of incidents that have caused the downtimes. This can range from accidents to regular wear and tear.
Route optimisation is widely related to fuel costs and delivery times. For any fleet business to be successful, you need to optimise routes and manage the time your drivers spend on the road. Measuring this metric can help you save fuel costs and expedite delivery times, leading to more happy customers.
Calculating average time per route
To calculate the average time per route, you need to combine the total time it takes to complete all deliveries—from the point of departure and back—and then divide by the number of deliveries made in a day.
Example calculation
For example, if a delivery fleet takes a total of 10 hours to complete 20 deliveries on a specific route, the average delivery time per route would be calculated as follows:
Average delivery time per route = 10 hours/20 deliveries = 0.5 hours per delivery.
This means that, on average, it takes 30 minutes to complete each delivery on this particular route.
It is important to note that this doesn’t take into consideration factors such as traffic or road closures, which may impact delivery times.
Fuel plays a significant role in any fleet and usually is the biggest cost. When measuring this metric, fleet managers must strive for fuel efficiency. They need to understand how much fuel contributes to overall costs and determine the exact amount required for efficient operations.
Fuel consumption is most commonly measured as litres per 100 kilometres travelled (l/100 km). This metric simplifies comparisons between vehicles, making it easier to identify areas for improvement.
Tracking fuel efficiency means going beyond just managing the fuel your fleet uses; it also entails keeping up with fuel trends; the monthly price decreases and increases to allow you to plan better. This metric is directly linked to other KPIs such as vehicle maintenance, driver behaviour, route optimisation, etc., proving just how important it is in the overall fleet performance.
Having a business, especially one that has a lot of assets, can be overwhelming. Manually updating documents when you acquire new assets or removing information for old assets can easily lead to mistakes. However, this is a necessary metric to measure to make sure that you know where all your assets are at all times and how they are being used. This will help you also track the ones that are overused or underused.
This KPI measures the average duration a vehicle remains operational within a fleet before it is replaced. Measuring this helps organisations assess the efficiency of their fleet management, optimise maintenance schedules, and plan for future vehicle acquisitions.
Calculating average lifespan
To calculate the average lifespan in years, follow these steps:
Example calculation
For instance, consider a fleet of three vehicles:
First, combine the years of operation:
Total years = 5+8+7 = 20 years
Next, divide the number of vehicles:
Average lifespan = 20 years/ 3 vehicles = 6.67 years.
This means that the average lifespan of the vehicles in this fleet is approximately 6.67 years.
Carbon emission KPIs are metrics used to measure the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by an organisation or industry. These KPIs can be used to identify areas of improvement, set goals, and track progress towards reducing emissions.
To calculate this, you would need to find out how many litres of fuel your business buys every month. Alternatively, you can divide the number of kilometres your fleet completes in a month by your average KPL (Kilometre per litre) to calculate the number of litres of fuel your fleet burned in that month. You can convert the number of litres of fuel into kilograms of CO2 emissions created that month.
Considering the KPIs mentioned above, it is clear that measuring all these metrics manually will be time-consuming, and the results may not be accurate. This is where Cartrack solutions come in; we are dedicated to making your daily business operations as seamless as possible, saving you admin time and helping you manage costs.
Cartrack’s fleet management platform gives you complete visibility of your business and team, helping you increase efficiency, decrease costs, and improve your fleet performance.
Let’s explore how Cartrack solutions can help your business meet its KPIs:
Our system lets you track your fleet’s location and assets in real-time. Fleet operators can view each trip's start and end points, along with detailed vehicle activity history. Additionally, our logbook feature enables the separation of business and private trips. This data helps identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement in your fleet operations.
To help minimise vehicle downtime, our software allows you to schedule maintenance and services according to your fleet’s needs to ensure uninterrupted workflow. This way, your staff will know why a specific vehicle or machinery is unavailable.
This will assist you in managing any downtime of vehicles, ensuring you will still deliver to your customers on time.
By analysing the number of jobs the driver completed, the distance travelled, and the fuel used, managers can use these insights to track and improve driver productivity. This will enable them to investigate the cause of low productivity.
Cartrack’s FMS (Fleet Management System) allows managers to receive updates on license renewal, permit, and registration compliance, ensuring that your fleet always abides by the law.
Knowing which driver is responsible for which vehicle can be challenging, especially if you have a large fleet. This is why we provide driver identification tags.
Driver ID tags are small, ring-sized tags that make it easy to track which driver is using which vehicle in your fleet. By pairing these tags with ignition keys, fleet managers can monitor vehicle usage and see who is driving and for how long. They also help prevent unauthorised use by sending alerts if an unregistered driver tries to operate a vehicle.
Integrated with GPS tracking, these tags allow you to monitor driving behaviour, identify unsafe practices, and take steps to improve safety through coaching or disciplinary action when necessary.
At Cartrack, we understand how crucial it is for drivers to make timely deliveries. They can only achieve this if their routes are optimised. This means using shorter routes with less traffic congestion and avoiding multiple trips at different times of the day but at the same location.
Fleet managers can plan routes accurately on our system, ensuring fuel efficiency and quicker deliveries. This ultimately increases customer satisfaction.
We have established that fuel is a large expense in fleet management; this is why we offer a fuel management system to help managers control fuel costs and optimise fuel usage.
Cartrack’s fuel management system uses these tools to help you control fuel costs:
Cartrack's AI-powered cameras act as an extra set of eyes on the road, helping you monitor driver behaviour. They provide real-time alerts for risky actions, such as not wearing seat belts or distracted driving, enabling drivers to correct these behaviours immediately.
In the event of an accident, these cameras provide valuable evidence that can protect your drivers from false accusations.
Cartrack’s Fleet Management System can detect high-impact collisions through crash detection technology. The system generates detailed incident reports that fleet managers can use to analyse what happened and provide targeted training to drivers.
Additionally, by granting managers access to historical data on past incidents, they can identify common factors or locations associated with accidents, allowing for targeted interventions such as geofencing. Operators can create geofences to monitor whether vehicles stay within designed safe zones or routes. Ensuring that drivers adhere to these predefined routes and avoid hazardous areas can significantly reduce the risk of accidents.
Cartrack has helped many businesses run their fleet efficiently over the past years. We have helped businesses monitor their fleet so they can improve their operations and fleet performance. One such company is RichLand Logistics.
RichLand is a leading logistics solutions provider. They successfully cater to customers’ needs in a vast number of sectors across the Southeast Asia region. This includes technology, petrochemicals, consumer goods, manufacturing, oil and gas, and freight forwarding, fulfilling more than 40,000 deliveries monthly.
They needed a system that could provide them with updates on fleet and driver information to ensure their deliveries remained on track and on time so they could maintain good service levels.
They also wanted insights into ways they could reduce their operational costs and boost productivity.
Here’s how Cartrack helped them:
Given the competitive nature of the fleet business industry in Singapore, it is essential to meet a business's KPIs. These KPIs will ensure that the business runs efficiently and reduces operational costs. This will ultimately lead to satisfied customers.
Utilising Cartrack’s technology can help businesses in Singapore streamline their fleet management processes, ultimately boosting fleet performance, improving customer satisfaction, reducing carbon emissions, and increasing profitability.
Are you ready to transform your fleet business and unlock its full potential? Contact us today to learn how we can help you drive growth, improve fleet operations, and stay ahead of the competition!
Q: What role does customer feedback play in improving fleet operations?
A: Customer feedback provides insights into delivery performance and service quality, helping fleet managers identify areas for improvement and enhance customer satisfaction.
Q: How often should fleet managers review their KPIs?
A: Fleet managers should review their KPIs regularly, either monthly or quarterly, to identify trends, assess performance, and implement necessary changes.
Q: How can fleet managers effectively communicate with drivers about performance expectations?
A: Fleet managers can host regular meetings and performance reviews to allow clear communication with drivers.
Discover the top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring fleet performance and explore how Cartrack’s fleet management systems can boost your fleet.
