Your fleet vehicles are critical to the success of your business, but they also come with high costs. Since fleet operation costs can impact your profitability, keeping them as low as possible is critical. By closely monitoring your needs and expenditures, and with a little cooperation from your fleet drivers, you’ll be able to cut back on spending without impacting your efficiency.
Here are our top five tips to help you bring those fleet operation costs back down.
1. Reduce Fleet Size
It may seem obvious, but reducing the number of vehicles in your fleet can drastically reduce fleet operation costs. Take a good look at your fleet and assess your day-to-day workload.
Are all of your fleet vehicles being used regularly? Could you still get the job done if some of your larger fleet vehicles, such as service body trucks, were replaced with more multipurpose trucks?
Another option when reducing fleet size is to rent your work vehicles. Rather than own 10 trucks, for example, why not keep the seven trucks you use most frequently and rent the other three whenever you have bigger jobs that require more vehicles?
Your upfront costs of ownership will decrease, and the rental cost can be kept to a minimum when only rented for short periods of time. Barco provides multiple quality work truck models for rental on a month-to-month basis at an affordable rate.
Contact us for a quote.
2. Travel Fewer Miles
To be fair, this is an area where fleet managers will usually not have much room to cut down. The fleet vehicles have to be driven to and from the worksites, after all.
However, if your employees and fleet drivers are using the fleet vehicles for their own personal use, you may be paying for more miles than you need to. Enforcing a strict personal use policy could help trim some of the expenses you didn’t even know were occurring.
Making sure your drivers aren’t getting lost and are taking the most efficient routes to and from work could also help. Installing a GPS in every fleet vehicle just might save you money in the long run.
3. Lower Fuel Costs
Unless you switch to electric fleet vehicles, you can’t avoid fuel costs. But you can closely monitor them to ensure that your drivers are using fuel responsibly. Giving your drivers fuel cards will help you track expenses more closely and will eliminate the need for drivers to log receipts.
You can also train your drivers to drive more efficiently. Aggressive driving, unnecessary speeding, and abrupt braking can cost you between $0.25 and $1 per gallon of fuel. Multiplied between all of the drivers and vehicles in your fleet, that waste can add up quickly.
4. Reduce Frequency of Crashes
Unless your drivers are getting into accidents a lot, this might not seem like it has the potential to save you much on your fleet operating costs.
However, reducing the likelihood of a crash can save you a lot of money in multiple ways:
- By hiring responsible, safe drivers, you may be able to get a good driver discount on automobile insurance.
- Repair or replacement costs caused by accidents will decrease in frequency and severity.
- You will be at a lower risk for lawsuits.
Training your drivers in automobile safety and installing in-dash cameras will help you track your drivers’ road behavior and help prevent accidents before they happen.
5. Lower Acquisition Costs
The cost of the work vehicles themselves is a huge expense. There are a few different ways to get these expenses down:
- Haggle with the dealer for a better price, especially if you are buying multiple vehicles.
- Buy used vehicles, rather than new ones, to save money on the price.
- Order vehicles from the factory and pay factory cost rather than marked-up dealer prices.
You can also eliminate purchase costs altogether by renting instead of buying. Rather than paying upfront for your fleet vehicles, Barco allows you to rent them monthly for as long as you like.
Let Barco Help
Barco is here to help you reduce expensive fleet operation costs by renting you the newest, most powerful fleet vehicles for an affordable monthly payment.
Contact Barco for a quote today to start renting your fleet.