What does ‘good’ look like when it comes to managing a public sector fleet? There’s no one simple answer, of course, for there are many facets to realising this status. In this article, we’ll go through the key attributes of a well-managed public sector fleet and how ForWare can help you achieve them.
When it comes to providing value for money, it’s important that you optimise your fleet’s productivity. And downtime is not productive. Of course, downtime is essential to ensuring fleet reliability and safety, and cannot be avoided entirely. That is not to say it can’t be reduced.
Predictive maintenance is essential to achieve this. By ensuring your vehicle attends its scheduled vehicle health check (VHC) and services, you can help prevent small defects from becoming big problems. ForWare helps by sending notifications as and when a vehicle becomes due for a service or VHC, so you book it in there and then.
Streamlining your repair authorisation process is another factor to consider when reducing your fleet’s downtime. With traditional systems, this can become unwieldy, and the vehicle can spend unnecessary time sitting in the workshop simply because the workshop couldn’t find someone to authorise a repair. With ForWare, there’s no need for endless phone calls and emails. The workshop simply sends a notification to the authoriser, who can click yes or no on the spot. You can streamline this process further by setting pre-approved spend limits and by designating additional authorisers should you be out of reach.
Transparency is essential to good fleet management. Fleet Managers should be able to provide full transparency for all costs involved in managing their fleet. This will be essential when it comes to audit time or just from day-to-day. For instance, you might be pulled up by a director as to why you’re spending €5000 on repairs to a particular vehicle. They might ask questions as to whether or not it had been properly maintained. ForWare can help you with both. Not only can it provide a comprehensive breakdown as to what the repair cost covers, but it can also enable you to pull up the vehicle’s full service and VHC history at the click of a button. You need not worry about having to dig out files and job cards.
Admin can often take up as much time in managing a public sector fleet as maintenance and repairs do. This can increase significantly according to the geographic spread of your fleet, with perhaps multiple service partners being involved in the fleet maintenance process. The fleet’s complexity can have an impact, too, especially in an age where fleets become diverse in terms of fuel type. This can entail dealing with bills from several different suppliers, and following a range of different processes for each one. This can be costly and inefficient in itself. ForWare can help streamline this process, too. For example, instead of receiving 10 different bills a month from 10 different workshops, ForWare consolidates them all into one bill a month, regardless of how many vehicles, repairs, and garages were involved. It’s simple, but it’s amazing just how much admin time this saves fleets.
Compliance and safety are absolutely essential to good fleet management. All discerning Fleet Managers should keep on top of this, and it doesn’t have to be difficult either. ForWare enables you to book your vehicles for their mandatory test (or tests) from one single portal (e.g., MOT, CVRT, NCT), including ancillary tests such as those for vehicles with tail-lifts, for example.
Post-test follow-up repairs can also be managed with ease. It also stores all compliance-related information in one location, so it can be recalled as and when you need to produce it.
As you can see, there is quite a bit involved when it comes to achieving good public sector fleet management, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult undertaking. ForWare is with you every step of the way to ensure ‘good’ is a word always associated with your fleet.
For a free demonstration on how ForWare can help with your fleet, call Alan today on 021 484 5550 or email alan@forware.io. And if you like what you see, we can have you up and running in no time.
Alan is a positive and proactive automotive professional with over 25 years of extensive experience in the motor trade.
Alan has been vital in developing and driving the ForWare System and implementing core workshop processes with some of the most significant state and private fleets in Ireland, the UK and Europe.
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