What are the challenges of fleet management?

The challenges of fleet management are:

Regulatory Compliance Enforcement of the regulations already on the books is increasing, and you can count on even more regulation. That's going to create more complexity, and potentially more cost, but the biggest issue is a lack of awareness of what fleets have to do to achieve compliance. One example is the Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) program launched by the Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The AFLA role is to educate in this regard; there are a lot of compliance issues that fleet managers need to understand, especially with trucks.

Growing Adoption of Telematics Overall, the momentum of telematics is building. There are a lot of opportunities for sales, service, and delivery fleets for better route optimization and driver productivity. Some companies are reticent to micro-manage their top sales people, but that's gradually changing.

Rising Fleet Transaction Costs - Acquisition and ResaleOEMs are adding more content to vehicles and making money, even on smaller cars. But all that content (fuel saving technologies, electronics, etc.) is increasing acquisition costs. Discipline is required to ensure selectors contain the lowest cost per mile vehicles that can do the job. In terms of resale, we've had an Excellent market during the past couple years, caused in part by low supply of off-lease vehicles. There's still pent-up demand for used vehicles, but it's not as good as it was. The peak is over. The market's not going to save you, you're going to have to carefully scrutinize each of the remarketing channels utilized to make sure sales proceeds are maximized - whether auctions, direct to drivers, or employees. It's time to go back to basic blocking and tackling.

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) With CAFE standards now set through Model Year 2025, fleet managers need to understand the long-term impact to the bottom line. Increased fuel economy technology is going to add cost to vehicles and fleet managers will need to implement cost-reduction solutions across all areas of the fleet to offset the additional acquisition expense. Long-term planning should include analysis of fleet utilization as OEMs produce more electric, hybrid, and alt-fuel vehicles to meet government mandates.

OEM Globalization One of the areas we all need to understand is the global fleet market and how different regulations will affect the tasks we perform every day when managing a fleet. Fleet managers will need to be well-versed in globalization, including working with OEMs to acquire vehicles and understanding the culture and best practices within each region.

Safety and Distracted Driving Driver safety will be a huge focus for fleet managers as the mandate to reduce cost and improve productivity continues. In addition to the human safety factor, there's insurance, maintenance, and loss of productivity with downtime of both drivers and vehicles - not to mention the administrative cost to process accident-related information. And the cost of violations will become significant as more states pass distracted driving laws.

Role of the Fleet Manager Gone are the days of having resources dedicated solely to managing the fleet. Fleet managers are tasked with multiple functions and that trend will continue. Traditional reporting structures are shifting; a greater percentage of fleet managers now report to sourcing or procurement as cost reduction continues to be the number one mandated corporate initiative.