What is Fleet Management?

Fleet management can encompass a variety of meanings. Primarily, fleet management involves maintenance, tracking, finance, fuel management and driver behavior and actions.

Although fleet management is associated with transportation companies, such as trucking or buses, fleet management is important to any company which depends upon trucks or cars for their business operations. This includes non-private entities such as government and non profit organizations which depend upon over the road vehicles.

Fleet management may provide benefit when complying with state and federal driving and transportation policies, such as those mandated by the various departments of transportation.

Fleet management is software and system driven. A company or organization may wish to bring the operations in house or hire in a third party company to provide fleet management solutions including software, hardware, service and installation.

Choosing the right fleet management software

Choosing the right fleet management software for your company's fleet, large or small, is a hard decision for the manager to make. Here are some considerations when choosing the best fleet management software for your company.

Is it scalable?
A good fleet management software package and vendor should provide a system which makes it easy to add and remove vehicles with minimum pain and work. Once the first vehicle has been added to the software system, further vehicles should be as simple as copying or recreating the first.

Further, the fleet management system should be able to support hundreds if not thousands of potential vehicles as well are programming parameters for each vehicle.

Is it affordable?

The days of highly customized and highly priced fleet management software platforms are over. There are hundreds of competitive companies which have lowered the costs for fleet management and your vendor should reflect those price changes.

There are a number of options available. Is the software available for purchase only or is there a monthly subscription costs? What are the set up fees? What are the wireless monthly charges or are they included? Is the hardware included? Is the wireless service included? Do I have to have special equipment or communications on my end to communicate with the application?

What is the return on investment (ROI)?

The fleet management software vendor should be able to provide its customers with an accurate estimate on the return on investment with purchase. Typically, this will be described with current costs vs. costs once the software is installed and a certain feature set of the fleet management software fleet is employed over a fixed period of months.

Typically, most fleet owners will see a reduction in fleet costs over a fixed amount of time (months or the first year) which will pay for the fleet management software application and monthly charges.

Will the vendor support the product after the sale?

A reputable fleet software vendor will support the product long after the sale with available technical support, software upgrades, regular communications and sales personnel available to provide new features for the fleet customer.