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For every expanding business, it is essential to stay ahead of the rising costs by minimising unnecessary expenses and staying organised.
A huge part of these rising costs always comes from transportation and fleet costs. One of the best ways to reduce fleet fuel costs is to manage your company’s fleet proficiently.
Nowadays new software is available, created just for this task, which makes managing even the largest fleets seem easy.
Ways to Reduce Fleet Fuel Costs
Odoo is one such software that has modules designed just for managing fleets. The advantage to using Odoo compared to other software is that one application can be fully integrated with many other applications and packages that essentially allows you to find all the information you need at a single place automatically.
Odoo is one of the world’s topmost business applications, where they provide over 30 applications to be used by many business organizations ranging from small scale businesses to large companies,
They have over 1500 members.
These members have contributed to expanding Odoo’s range to provide up to 1600+ apps, to get in touch with Odoo contact Syncoria. Syncoria is a digital transformation solution provider based in Canada, and an official Odoo Ready partner. Odoo can assist in reducing fuel costs in several ways, such as:
Planning better routes
Odoo Open ERP Fleet Management with tracking via GPS allows you to see not only the route taken by each of your vehicles but also the date on which the device was first detected by the system and the speed at which it is travelling.
If you observe the routes taken by your fleet and have several employees going to the same work location or job site, you can have them take one vehicle instead of driving separately.
Using this application you can cut down on fuel costs by identifying shorter routes and bypassing congested routes.
Most needless fuel loss occurs when vehicles are staying idle in traffic and logging in zero or very low MPG. You can avoid the stop and go traffic by choosing better routes, effectively decreasing fuel loss.
Many companies nowadays choose to eliminate personal-use liberties given to employees to reduce fuel spend. Keeping track of the route taken through the GPS, unauthorized usage of company vehicles can be kept in check.
Another approach could be to adjust fleet routes to include or at least be closer to the dealer repair network to cut down on travelling costs for maintenance and repair works.
Setting a standard for fleet vehicles
Maintaining a certain standard for fleet vehicles is crucial to lowering fuel costs. Using outdated car specifications and worn down car parts can lead to gallons of fuel wastage.
The Odoo fleet management allows the users to keep the history of the vehicle with categorical details on hand. The records of the work orders generated for a particular vehicle, usage of tyres, battery life, engine status, etc.
The system can be updated and registered manually if wanted. If any vehicle seems to be inadequate or is no longer useful, the entry can easily be deleted or written off.
Unnecessary fuel loss can be avoided by establishing minimum MPG requirements and choosing cars with the good specifications from the get-go.
Keeping track of fuel consumption
Introducing the use of a fuel card helps avoid unauthorized purchases by enabling fleet managers to control exactly what their drivers’ are purchasing.
Restricting the type of fuel purchased is an easy way to control costs. A fuel card can be designed to only allow buying of unleaded gasoline, and exclude the more expensive premium and super-unleaded types of gasoline.
You can both manually and automatically record the fuel consumption for individual vehicles by either keeping logs of fuel refills for individual vehicles by entering data yourself, or by assigning fuel cards to each vehicle that would be directly linked to your system.
Fuel cards are easier as when linked with the Odoo module, each transaction is automatically recorded and sent to the fleet manager along with date, time and type of fuel purchased. This would enable you to keep track of each transaction routinely for individual vehicles.
Separating tabs for individual vehicles
Odoo has a very user-friendly interface that lets you maintain separate tabs for individual vehicles and representing them as easy to view thumbnails.
The vehicles can be differentiated effortlessly as the application allows you to add detailed descriptions of brand, make and model, registration number, number of doors and seats, colour, etc. for each car so there is no room for misidentification.
It also maintains a comprehensive record of the vehicle drivers, details like Name, Driving License, Contact Information, etc. to help you monitor their performance. Just one click of a mouse lets you see all the information for any particular vehicle at one place. Most importantly, you can pinpoint which drivers are using excessive fuel or which are the low mileage cars that are not up to standards and ultimately discard them in the long run, leading to lower fuel costs.
Maintenance and Repairs
The application can provide a daily report of the fleet’s maintenance needs. The report can include odometer readings which can be used to estimate services required for each vehicle and keep track of repairs. The application can also update the Odometer logs automatically every time the vehicle goes for rent or service.
Analysis and Reporting
The module has the ability to generate informative and constructive reports that give you a clear idea of your fleet’s performance.
It includes data from previous records of the business and can make profit projections for upcoming years. It shows all the costs related to any vehicle from your fleet and gives very valuable insights about the returns from each vehicle in order to improve your future fleet investments.
The reports are very dynamic and show you the data through various visual representations. Ranging from Line charts, Bar charts, Pie Charts, PDF reports, to Business Intelligence reports.
The reports even give you detailed analysis for any previous mismanagement and how can it be evaded in the future by finding suitable solutions for it. Observing an overview of the total fleet costs may lead to the discovery of avoidable expenses.