Finding the right fleet management tools

Do you remember a time before calculators? No, neither do I.

My father used to try and explain to me how it ‘used to be done’ with long hand arithmetic, trig tables, and so on. I think he realised his enthusiasm was misplaced when he looked at my face: rather than enlightened engagement, all he saw was the look of bored bemusement.

Now calculators are everywhere: on your desk, on your computer, on your smartphone as an app – we use them every day as a valuable timesaving tool.

A bit like the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet – it makes our lives easier, helps organise complex material into meaningful numbers and reports.

No wonder so many fleets use it to manage their cars and vans – a 2020 survey of multi-national fleets by Fleet Europe found that virtually 50% of companies used tools like Excel and Access to manage their fleets.

And yet in a world where we can say ‘Alexa, turn on the lamps’ in our home or get Alexa to choose a radio station in our car, is sticking to a spreadsheet the smart approach to fleet management?

Well, the answer to that is yes if you don’t use anything at all. Because some form of management is better than absolutely none.

But when we can go online to manage so much of our lives, managing your fleet online is certainly the smart answer to proactive fleet management.

At Fleet Alliance we have e-fleet – it’s our own cloud based fleet management suite that corrals all your fleet data into one place. It can be accessed at any time of the day from anywhere you choose (on the beach if you really want to …).

And it includes all your fleet, whatever the funder, even those employees who use their private cars on business.

There’s mileage and predictive mileage reports, driver lists, inspection reports as well as service due reports and so on – it makes the fleet manager’s job so much easier because the data is proactive, and the interface easy to use. You can spot exceptions easily because the dashboard will tell you – and take proactive steps to manage the exception.

But we don’t just have the technology to manage your fleet, we have technology that reaches your drivers, too. They can use our e-fleet mobile web app on their smartphones which provides critical support numbers should they require assistance – everything is there from booking a service to booking windscreen repair, along with journey logging so business journeys can be split from private journeys.

Our e-fleet management technology is the answer to managing fleets smartly – and makes fleet management by spreadsheet look like long hand arithmetic.