Fleet Management, You Are What You Measure

Fleet Management by Objective: The Goal of Continuous Improvement

Do you manage your fleet from a tactical level — putting out day-to-day fires — or from a strategic level focusing on achieving specific long-term objectives? The exemplary fleet managers rise above the level of simply managing day-to-day work and are goal-oriented in all aspects of fleet management. These fleet fuel managers practice strategic fleet management, which stresses the importance of achieving objectives and the use of metrics to benchmark progress.

Metrics is the process of developing objective sets of data to measure how your fleet is doing relative to goals such as diesel fuel prices compared to others. A metric is a quantifiable and repeatable standard of measurement. Each measurement can be expressed in a discrete number.

Metrics can be used to develop benchmarks, a standard by which you can measure progress against past performance. Benchmarks are trends or comparisons in metrics. Metrics are most valuable when they are compared to another metric or benchmark. By capturing metrics and benchmarking them, a fleet fuel manager can demonstrate the fleet’s improved performance for things like fuel card transactions, diesel fuel prices, diesel fuel additives cost and fuel savings.

Metrics Measure Desired Outcomes

To be truly effective, the metrics you develop and track need to be part of everyday fleet fuel management. The most powerful metrics are those that directly measure desired outcomes such as fueling cost reduction, performance improvement, service consistency, or anything that has numbers associated with it or that can be quantified. Other examples of fleet management metrics include monitoring vehicle utilization, technician productivity, and vehicle downtime, or analyzing of fuel efficiency by vehicle and user group.

Choose the metrics that allow you to make decisions that benefit not only fleet fuel operations, but also user departments. Decide which metrics are important to the organization and involve user groups in these decisions. Make sure everyone is on board and knows the importance of the metrics. Metrics are useless unless valid data is collected and entered into the fleet management system. The IT truism comes into play here: garbage in, garbage out. To demonstrate the value of metrics and benchmarks to user groups and management, start small and grow from there. Choose one area of fleet to focus on initially. Measure something that most likely will have a positive outcome. Collecting and analyzing metrics should be a continuous process. Fleet managers who use this approach will tell you that it works and once you get it going, will become a part of your daily routine. Ideas for measurement could be diesel fuel prices against the DOE average, fleet card transactions from one month to the next, average amount of fill up in gallons on your fuel cards, fuel saving from last quarter to this quarter or something as simple as diesel fuel additives cost compared by different brands.

Management by Objective

When developing a metrics program, keep in mind the Chinese proverb: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” When you measure fleet management services performance, set realistic goals for your company’s improvement. When you achieve these goals, raise the bar and keep measuring. Maintaining an efficient fleet management solution is not a goal, but a journey. You need to keep feeding metrics back into your processes to continually improve fleet’s performance. Metrics can modify behavior. Push your metrics to your user group customers to show how they can improve departmental efficiency and make fleet more cost-effective. Now start measuring with fleet management and lower those diesel fuel prices.

You are what you measure.