Every local government has a variety of vehicular assets and equipment across multiple departments to acquire, maintain, and replace. Without the proper technology, recognizing the current status of a vehicle and getting necessary inspections and maintenance taken care of is easier said than done. And when issues with vehicles fail to get addressed, the damage can be costly and potentially life threatening.
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In this article, you will come to understand the importance of a government fleet management strategy, what your local strategy should include, and how technology can assist in managing your fleet.
What is a Government Fleet Management Strategy?
Government fleet management is an all encompassing term representative of every task that falls under the scope of purchasing, maintaining, and replacing government transportation assets like cars, trucks, buses, trains, and other vehicles.
Why Do Local Governments Need a Fleet Management Strategy?
A well-defined local government fleet management strategy highlights:
Which transportation assets are in your government&#;s possession?
How much money is being spent to purchase, maintain, and use government vehicles?
What is the current condition of vehicles across your fleet?
Which vehicles are in need of required maintenance / inspection?
Which assets need to be acquired or replaced?
Government fleet management technology allows local government leadership to track the status of assets and track financial data as it pertains to vehicles in every relevant local government department.
How Does Government Fleet Management Software Work?
Here are the key variables to define in your government fleet management strategy, and how government technology can help to manage critical data:
1. How Much Money is Being Spent to Purchase and Maintain Your Fleet?
Fleet management undoubtedly takes a large chunk out of local government departments&#; budgets. When your local government leadership is forming strategic plans and considering departmental budgets, they will need to have an inside view on how much it costs to purchase new vehicles and how expensive it has been to maintain various asset types to make informed decisions.
How Does Fleet Management Software Help with Financial Management?
Government software pulls financial data into intuitive reports and dashboards that break down where funds are being allocated and how much is being spent to purchase and maintain vehicles across departments.
Pro Tip: Customized government reports and dashboards can be used to track any government KPI, financial or otherwise. Track where government fees and fines are being collected, how much money is being spent and generated from each department to make informed decisions around budgeting.
2. Where are Government Vehicles Being Used and How Often?
A key component to fleet management is the actual tracking of your vehicles when they are on the road. Using government software allows you to contextualize:
What types of assets are being used the most? Which aren&#;t being used much?
How many miles are being put on a vehicle and when it will need a maintenance check.
The financial costs associated with gas, man hours on the road, and fleet maintenance.
exactly
a vehicle is at at any time on a
3D GIS map.
Where
How Does Government Technology Help Manage Vehicles on the Road?
With mobile tracking available with fleet management software, you&#;ll be able to keep an eye on both your government assets and government employees in real time to ensure driver safety and efficiency.
3. Where is Paperwork Related to Your Fleet Being Stored?
If you&#;re still using paper-based storage systems, your local government undoubtedly has thousands of forms pertaining to the acquisition and management of your fleet filed in various cabinets.
Where are these documents being stored? Is specific documentation easily accessible? If you&#;re answering no, your local government will need to address document storage as a component of your fleet management strategy.
How Can Fleet Management Software Help with Public Records Storage?
You can become a paperless local government when you switch to cloud based government management software. You can pull up historical records of every vehicle in the entirety of your local government fleet. Bills of purchase, records of maintenance, and any other relevant documents are accessible to relevant government officials from anywhere within seconds.
Learn more about Government Data Storage for mastering online workflows and digital document storage.
4. When is Each Vehicle Due for Scheduled Inspection & Maintenance?
Government leadership will need to work with the public works department to determine how often various vehicle types should make the trip to the shop for a look under the hood, either on a timely basis (every 3 months, years, etc.) or mileage basis (every 5,000, 10,000, 100,000 miles etc.)
How Does
Public Works Software
Help with Scheduled Inspections & Maintenance?
Once you&#;ve met with your local department of public works (DPW) to determine when each vehicle is due for an inspection or maintenance, public works software will automatically schedule recurring inspections and maintenance sessions. Save time on scheduling and ensure safety with regular reviews from mechanics of the entirety of your municipal fleets.
The technology that automates government scheduling is known as robotic process automation, and can help with scheduling government IT ticketing, sending relevant reminders and notifications to your citizens, and beyond.
With competitive price and timely delivery, Shenzhen Dongfeng sincerely hope to be your supplier and partner.
5. What Are Your Vehicle Inspection Workflows?
Regular inspections of your entire local government fleet will be critical to ensuring safety and preventing accidents. Mechanics and other experts in your local government will need to determine the exact components of a thorough inspection for each vehicle type.
How Can Mobile Inspection Software Help with Fleet Management?
Beyond scheduling inspections, government software can streamline your inspection processes too. GovInspect mobile government inspection software lets DPW officials record the findings of the inspection directly from their cell , which saves time and automatically stores vehicle records in your cloud based platform.
6. Are Work Orders Pertaining to Your Fleet Being Addressed?
Accountability for government officials is key to ensuring nothing slips through the cracks when it comes to managing vehicles. Unfortunately, disorganized governments fail to hold officials accountable to perform regular maintenance checks and complete repairs on a damaged vehicle in a timely manner.
If your fleet isn&#;t being regularly maintained, mechanical problems are inevitable. And if your DPW is taking months to repair vehicles, you&#;re missing critical infrastructure for your locality for all of that time.
How Does Fleet Management Software Help with Accountability?
The automated scheduling of fleet maintenance ensures that every vehicle is being inspected on a regular basis. And, if an issue arises or an accident leaves any vehicle in your fleet damaged, your fleet management software uses timestamps to show who is in charge of addressing and how long each repair is taking. Holding DPW officials accountable will ensure that work is completed in a timely manner.
7. Do You Have the Critical Government Staff to Manage a Fleet
Top notch mechanics, and potentially a fleet manager, are critical to ensuring your fleet is acquired and maintained in the most efficient way possible. Public sector recruitment is integral to the functionality of the DPW, especially with auto technician shortages. Once you recruit quality talent, onboarding and training will be needed to maximize their productivity and educate them on your government fleet management workflows.
How Does Government Management Software Help with Accountability?
If you choose to embrace government software across departments including the human resources department, your local government can list any job opening to your government website. Once the role is filled, GovPilot resources can be passed to the new employee to get educated on your government workflows and the processes related to fleet management or their relevant responsibilities.
Learn more about modern local government HR:
Mastering Government Fleet Management
GovPilot wields the power to automate and streamline fleet management workflows across the board; From tracking spending to acquire and maintain vehicles, to scheduling inspections and regular maintenance, to storing paperwork associated with each vehicle.
To learn more about cloud government fleet management services, book a free demo.
Local Government Fleet Management FAQs
What is Government Fleet Management Software?
Local government fleet management software is technology meant to streamline every aspect of the fleet management strategy. Budget reports allow government leadership to have a real-time view of the current spending on vehicle acquisition and maintenance. Scheduling tech will automatically assign and timestamp work orders and inspections. Vehicle inspections can be documented via a cell , and the entirety of paperwork associated with each vehicle will be stored in and accessible from the cloud.
Why Do Local Governments Need a Fleet Management Strategy?
Most localities have dozens of vehicles across local government departments. Your government owes it to your government workers operating the vehicles as well as citizens using public transportation to keep your fleet inspected and maintained to ensure safety.
How to Track Government Fuel Consumption?
With increasingly expensive gas prices, your local government needs to seriously consider the amount of gasoline being purchased and used to keep logistics costs within budget. Luckily, government fleet management software can track vehicle movement in real time, allowing you to discern exactly how many miles each vehicle is being driven.
Why Store Fleet Records in the Cloud?
The total amount of paperwork for each vehicle adds up; the contract to acquire the vehicle, work order records, inspection records and beyond can result in a lot of filing space taken up if you&#;re using paper-based workflows. With cloud-based data storage, government officials can track down the records associated with any vehicle in any department in a few minutes.
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A municipal fleet is critical to the operation of any city or town. If you&#;re managing a municipal fleet, no doubt you&#;re feeling the stress of a strained vehicle supply chain and rising vehicle-operating costs. At the same time, the residents you serve want to see you putting their tax dollars to good use. They want to see your team maintaining their neighborhoods in top condition but with tight budget control.
If your public works and emergency vehicles look a little bumped and bruised, that&#;s ok, as long as they are keeping the streets and public spaces clean and safe. If the vehicles look too shabby, that might reflect badly on the city or town. If they look too flashy and well-equipped, residents might be concerned that excess tax dollars were spent on extraneous accessories.
Keeping the vehicles in your municipal fleet up and running within budget requires coordination of best practices throughout the vehicle lifecycle of Buy, Drive, Service, and Sell. Below are five trends municipal fleets are seeing in and tips for planning alongside them for long-term costs and efficiencies.
Urgency to Reduce Carbon Emissions
Today, most municipal fleets are working toward vehicle compliance with environmental regulations such as the Energy Policy Act or similar sustainability goals that their local government has established.
When transitioning from gas or diesel to alternative fuel vehicles, including electric and propane, you will find a variety of types for passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks. As you move into medium-duty trucks, the number of options goes down, and even fewer are available for heavy-duty vehicles.
The process of moving to a more sustainable fleet is complicated, from choosing the types of vehicles that are best suited to do the work they need to perform, to navigating the supply chain process, and coordinating an infrastructure plan for charging or refueling.
If you are ready to begin your fleet&#;s transition or have already started the process and are facing obstacles, you can reach out to organizations such as the Electrification Coalition or automotive solution providers, like Holman. These teams have insight and connections that will help ease the process. They&#;ll help ensure your greener fleet meets your sustainability goals while also remaining productive.
Securing the Best Lease or Purchase Agreements
With the current vehicle supply chain challenges and economic situation, municipal fleets are facing difficult budgetary decisions. In many cases, municipal fleets are keeping their vehicles in service longer. However, old and worn vehicles experience excessive vehicle downtime. At some point you simply have to replace them or you risk stunted productivity. When you come to that breaking point, should you pay for new vehicles with capital funds? Or should you look for competitive leasing programs?
The GSA AutoChoice is a great resource for municipal fleets to lease or purchase vehicles at volume discounted prices. Also, Holman works with the GSA to provide both fossil fuel-powered vehicles and zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), including battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) models.
Optimizing Data Visibility through Telematics
A growing number of municipal fleets are adding telematics devices to their vehicles for a more accurate understanding of vehicle performance and driver behavior. When you integrate your fleet&#;s telematics data with other licensing, fuel, maintenance, and accident data, you can most effectively identify current efficiencies and savings but also uncover opportunities to introduce additional best practices. Telematics data also helps narrow down options for introducing alternative fuel vehicles &#; matching minimum vehicle output with maximum work requirements.
Municipal fleet specialists with advanced systems that can integrate all of your vehicle data can help you analyze fleet costs and productivity. For example, the business analysts at Holman, using the Holman Insights system, can help you identify an optimal replacement schedule for vehicles with extended in-service cycles. The data coming from your fleet&#;s telematics devices will pinpoint vehicles that are contributing least to your municipal operations and pulling the greatest draw on your budget.
Managing In-House Vehicle Maintenance
If your municipal fleet is like most, you also operate your own maintenance garages to control vehicle downtime and operating expenses. In this era when fleet vehicles are staying in service longer, garages may be overwhelmed, since older and high-mileage vehicles have greater repair needs. Plus keeping up with parts inventory is more hectic due to the strained supply chain plus increased demand situation.
In these cases, municipal fleets are relying on maintenance management software such as the Holman Garage Management System. It allows municipal fleets to schedule mechanic workloads with the demand of both preventive and unscheduled maintenance. And it will automate parts inventory replenishing (Holman is a GSA-approved parts supplier), track inspections, integrate accident data and expenses, and help identify vehicles primed for replacement.
Relative to alternative fuel vehicles, this is a time when municipal fleet mechanics need to stay trained on the latest automotive technologies. If your garage is inexperienced in any specific areas, such as electric vehicle maintenance, the Holman Garage Management System is integrated with an expansive network of national account and independent shops. With it, you can coordinate those maintenance needs that need to be outsourced while keeping tight cost control and optimized scheduling.
Maximizing Used Vehicle Sales Results
Another condition resulting from the new vehicle shortage, the used vehicle market is still posting high numbers for most vehicle types. While fuel costs remain above normal, wholesale prices for full-size crossovers and SUVs are going down, but compact cars and subcompact crossovers are increasing in value.
Remarketing success always comes down to finding the right buyer in the right market, and for anyone juggling fleet management with other responsibilities, that&#;s a hard ask. Municipal fleets that turn over this time-consuming, specialized task to dedicated remarketing professionals will have the best results to report.
Even across the broad range of assets that municipalities typically carry &#; snowplows, garbage trucks, street sweepers and pavers, excavators, etc. &#; there are profits to be gained in today&#;s market. Holman&#;s EquipmentDirect portal can produce pleasantly unexpected returns that will look great on your books.
Municipal fleet management has its own unique set of challenges and solutions. Finding an automotive services partner that can support you through the entire vehicle supply chain and vehicle life cycle will help ensure you hit your goals and serve your local government well.
To stay up to date with automotive and fleet management news, subscribe to the Morning Brake. And remember, when it comes to municipal fleet management, Holman has the expertise and resources to help you. Contact us today.
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