No matter how careful your drivers are, sooner or later you are likely to experience some form of vehicle downtime. It then comes down to a case of how you go about downtime management.

Whether it is an accident on the road, a mechanical problem, or a breakdown – you need to be able to properly manage you fleet when one or more of the vehicles is out of action, and to be able to get the driver back on the road as quickly as possible.

When a vehicle is out of action, the driver can’t do their job. Goods are going undelivered, jobs missed, productivity slows or grinds to a halt. What’s more, you’re still paying the driver’s salary – if the problem isn’t resolved it can soon become a loss-making problem.

Regular serving, good maintenance and a roadside recovery membership are all ways to get a handle on this form of downtime.

Another thing that can contribute to downtime is poor employee motivation – essentially, are they dawdling on the job?

These days, there is a vast variety of telematics apps and technology out there to help you keep tabs on your fleet in real-time. Your employees are more likely to behave, stick to the speed limit and waste less time when they know they are being watched by someone in authority.

These sorts of tracking tools often rely on GPS technology in order to be able to present real-time data, and often include a host of other features.

Like calculating the whole life cost of a business fleet, downtime management is another crucial system to have in place if a small or medium-sized company is to run a fleet efficiently.

If you’ve found this article useful then make sure you visit our complete A-Z of business fleet terms, which provides a complete glossary so you can make an informed purchasing decision.

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