07/06/2009

Fleetistics is defined as "Statistical analysis, for business purposes, of commercial fleet vehicle operations". It is a term we coined to encompass the study of fleet operations to find inefficiencies. I'm such a believer that in today's business environment you have to study every aspect of your fleet for inefficiency. When every nickel counts, you better know where you are wasting money and sometimes you have to spend a dime to save a dollar.

Fleetistics is founded on the premise that you can't manage what you can't or won't measure. Small fleet operators that have 2 vehicles of 4 that are inefficient means 50% of the fleet is inefficient. In a large fleet it may take 500 vehicles to get to the same percentage. So it does not matter if you have one or 5,000 vehicle, you better know and understand what is going on with the two most expensive resources in your company, your fleet and your people.

Measuring fleet performance can be done in an almost unlimited number of ways. Large organizations invest huge amounts of money into spotting inefficiencies. Some have fulltime employees with "Black belt" certifications that do nothing but study processes and procedures to develop statistical analysis. Sometimes changing a single procedure can have a giant impact on the bottom-line. Sometimes you have to invest more money to change a process or integrate other technology to get the maximum efficiency. In a small organization, it might mean updating a skill set of a key employee, dispatching workers from home, using maintenance applications, getting two-way communication or fleet tracking technology.

Fleetistics encompasses all these things and is really the overall descriptive term for this process. If you take it one step further you can think of Fleetistics as a mindset, a way of thinking about every aspect of your fleet operation and how it can be improved.