Very few things can affect your fleet’s efficiency and running costs as much as driving behavior. By improving your entire fleet’s driving behavior, you can reduce operational costs such as fuel expenditure, maintenance charges, insurance costs, etc. Some recent studies have even found that, by encouraging the right driving behavior, a fleet of vehicles can reduce its running costs by nearly 7%.
Why Should You Analyze Driver Behavior?
There’s no denying the fact that some drivers in your fleet are probably better than others. Drivers who engage in excessive idling are wasting fuel, those who drive extremely fast may cause damage to other vehicles, and the ones who accelerate or brake harshly aren’t doing your vehicles any favors. So, it comes down to one simple fact: the key to improving your fleet’s efficiency lies in improving the drivers’ performance. And, to make that happen, you need to thoroughly analyze the driving behavior of your fleet’s drivers.
Creating a Comprehensive Driving Behavior Report
Don’t jump the gun and start your analysis hastily. First, consider creating a format that will display the performance scores of each driver in your fleet in a user-friendly manner. To make sure the report is comprehensive, you should take various parameters into account such as speeding, flooring, excessive idling, harsh braking, cornering, etc. It’s quite natural to be overwhelmed at the thought of compiling such a vast amount of data and arranging it in a meaningful way. Luckily, you don’t have to–there are fleet management systems that will automatically generate detailed and easy-to-understand driving reports to make things simpler for you,
How Can Fleet Management Systems Help?
These fleet management systems come with a plethora of tools that will allow your fleet managers to quickly create detailed driving reports or access specific driving metrics based on the data obtained from the vehicles. It’s wise to invest in a fleet management system that will not only help you track the vehicles, but also help you analyze the driving behavior of each and every driver in your fleet.
Using Driving Behavior Reports for Monthly Employee Reviews
Driving behavior analysis reports provide an easy way to analyze the performance of your drivers and identify the key issues in their driving patterns during monthly reviews. You will be able to pull up the data from the report and compare the drivers with each other. Rising fuel expenditures, exacerbated by the lack of appropriate data and insights, definitely cause some hand-wringing in monthly review meetings. But, with the help of detailed driving behavior reports, you can now focus your attention on identifying the underperforming drivers in your fleet. Through proper training, you can improve their driving performance and encourage them to drive more effectively.
The Right Incentives
The above-mentioned reports can help you formulate driver reward and incentive programs. This will boost employee engagement and motivate your drivers to improve their driving behavior. To make things interesting, you can use the performance scores from the report for creating a monthly league table that will encourage healthy competition among your drivers.
The Benefits of Driving Behavior Analysis
- Reducing fuel expenses – Excessive idling by your drivers will undoubtedly put a strain on your budget. You may already be wasting a gallon per day due to idling. Excessive speeding is extremely expensive as well. However, if you manage to reduce the idling time by just 15 minutes and slow down the average speed of a car in your fleet by 5 mph, you can reduce fuel consumption by nearly 30%.
- Reducing accidents – By analyzing the driving behavior of your mobile workforce, you will be able to identify dangerous and reckless driving habits. Thus, your fleet managers can take corrective actions before it’s too late.
- Reducing wear and tear of vehicles – Driving behavior analysis yields the info you need to reduce incidents of aggressive driving. That way, your vehicles will be safe and ultimately, you won’t have to shell out a lot of money on maintenance and repairs.
It is evident that driving behavior analysis and reports are indispensable when you are running a fleet of vehicles. Consider adopting a good fleet management and analysis system to start improving your drivers’ performance to reduce operational costs and enhance your fleet’s efficiency.
