Eliminating Fleet Blind Spots And Bottlenecks With A Digital Blueprint

Blind spots and bottlenecks in a fleet vehicle’s life cycle can impact a fleet management company’s efficiency and profitability. By leveraging technology solutions, such as digital blueprints, FMCs can attain better visibility into their operations so they can eliminate inefficiencies and improve decision making. 


Behind the scenes of any fleet management company (FMC), there’s an elaborate vehicle life cycle at play: acquiring the vehicle, preparing it for usage, getting it to the customer and then figuring out what to do with it once the lease is up.

Sounds straightforward enough, but there are dozens of different steps and sub-steps involved in that life cycle – and when there’s that many processes, there are inevitably various blind spots and bottlenecks that impact efficiency and, ultimately, profitability.

Fortunately, by creating a digital blueprint of every process in the vehicle life cycle, FMCs can get better visibility into their operations, wring out inefficiencies and start making better business decisions.

Inability To See The Full Picture

Blind spots and bottlenecks take many forms. A newly ordered vehicle can sit in title and registration days or even weeks longer than it needs to because the fleet manager doesn’t have real-time visibility into the status of that particular vehicle’s registration. As a result, they have to make repeated phone calls and emails to get a status update, and things inevitably fall through the cracks – the old “oh, the title actually came through a week ago – didn’t we email you?”

The net result is delays in getting the vehicle to the customer, which means more idle days where that vehicle isn’t generating revenue.

Pitfalls lurk around the upfitting and vehicle prep phase as well. After placing an order for a pickup truck, for example, the FMC might need to get it kitted out with a carbon truck bed liner and a lockable storage box before it is delivered to the customer. However, what if once the vehicle arrives at the upfitter, those specific parts are on back order and will take several weeks to arrive?

Voilà: another delay in getting the vehicle to the customer – one that could have been avoided if the upfitter had received a heads-up about what new vehicles were coming down the pipeline so that they could plan ahead with ordering parts, preempting any supply chain bottlenecks.

Similar blind spots arise when it comes to determining what to do with a vehicle when its lease is up. Sell it off? Fix it up and lease it to another customer? What is actually the most profitable decision for the business?

Blueprinting For Success

If FMCs create a digital blueprint of their fleet business – a flow map that traces the path of a vehicle through each step of the vehicle life cycle – they can start to gain visibility into where the blind spots and bottlenecks exist within their organization.

This is not necessarily a new concept. Business improvement methodologies like Six Sigma process mapping have been a mainstay of organizational improvement for decades, using everything from pen and paper, to Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks. What’s new is that technology can help pull together ever greater amounts of information about the business, creating more comprehensive process maps.

Getting Started

As a first step, organizations should ensure they are including all the right departments and teams in their blueprinting efforts. Operations, customer experience, finance and IT are all critical to properly blueprinting the process workflow because each department impacts the others. (For instance, a breakdown in the operations workflow can cause delays to delivery, which can impact revenue and customer satisfaction. The fallout from an operational snag is not limited to just the operations department.)

Once they’ve mapped out processes, FMCs should be clear on what specific issue they’re trying to move the needle on. Less idle time for vehicles? Faster delivery to customers? Building key performance indicators for each step in the life cycle is important so you can measure how long a vehicle is remaining in a particular stage or step in the process.

Connecting data from different systems like CRM, ERP and fleet systems will allow you to better track performance. There are also plenty of business intelligence tools on the market that can consolidate data and provide reporting.

This consolidation is valuable, but these tools still require someone to take action on the information they provide in order to improve KPIs. In other words, they’ll provide information about “what’s going on,” but they won’t automatically initiate the logical next step toward improving the status quo and moving a KPI in the right direction.

A platform that can orchestrate automations can be useful here in helping vehicles move more smoothly through the life cycle – for example, by triggering certain actions to take place as soon as a specific step or sub-step has been crossed off, which will then optimize completion of the remaining steps. (Disclosure: My company provides an automation platform, as do others.) While the various steps of a process can be performed manually by organizations via checklists and consistent, ongoing communication, automation reduces the chances of anything being inadvertently missed.

Companies may experience some challenges when getting started with automation platforms. For example, some employees are too busy being overworked to take even more time to set up a platform to make their life easier. Other employees may resist the idea of automating part of their jobs. But positioning this technology as getting digital workers to offload their grunt work helps.

For smaller companies, the initial investment may also be a deterrent to moving forward with the initiative. Since it’s a new platform, I recommend you look into which group would have this already baked into their budgets. Additionally, it can be daunting to think about automating workflows across your entire company at once. Breaking it up into smaller groups first is one mitigating approach.

Given how quickly one suboptimal step in the vehicle life cycle can ripple outward and cause a negative impact on the business, it’s well worth FMCs taking a second look at their organizational processes and creating a digital blueprint – one that allows them to find and eliminate the blind spots and bottlenecks that might be holding them back. Ultimately, this is a case where you can’t fix problems if you can’t even see them.

 

This article was written by Aarjav Trivedi from Forbes and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.