Fleet Scheduling Software Ensures Vehicles Are In The Right Place At The Right Time

One of the most important jobs of running a vehicle fleet, especially a truck fleet, is in drawing up schedules for upcoming jobs. If the schedules are badly drawn up there will often be late delivery of goods, and increased costs due to not having the vehicles in the right place at the right time. It is therefore exceptionally important that any fleet management system has some kind of fleet scheduling software as part of the package.

There are several elements to effective fleet scheduling, and the software should be able to draw up schedules from scratch, redo schedules when needed, create schedules that ensure the maximum economic running of the fleet, and ensure that the schedules can be kept without breaking any transportation regulations. This article will look at these points and what needs to be considered when buying fleet scheduling software.

A good piece of fleet scheduling software should create schedules from scratch. It should give the fleet manager a long term overview of the fleet's long term plans and also a view of short-term operations, such as those done for one-off clients. The software should enable the manager to make substantial cost savings due to optimum scheduling of the fleet, and should present the schedules and associated savings in an easy to read report. The software should also show all data in charts for ease of reading.

As well as creating the vehicle fleet's original long-term and short-term schedules, the software must also be able to change schedules quickly and easily when the need should arise. This is almost certain to happen at some point, either due to bad weather affecting fleet running times, or accidents and breakdowns putting some of the trucks or cars out of action. The software should allow the fleet manager to react to such incidents quickly and easily and reallocate vehicle resources, making sure the right vehicles are in the right place with as little work as possible.

One of the most important parts of scheduling a fleet is to ensure that the schedules drawn up can be kept by the vehicles assigned to the job without losing economy due to increased fuel use or increased vehicle maintenance. The software should take into account the optimum running speeds and fuel use of the vehicles and create schedules accordingly. The last thing that any fleet manager wants is increased fuel costs and increased maintenance costs due to the vehicles being overstretched to meet extremely tight schedules.

There is another side to the optimum running of a vehicle fleet. As well as making sure the vehicles are running optimally in terms of fuel use, the scheduling software should ensure that the schedules can be kept without breaking any of the many regulations that govern transport and freight carrying such as highway speed limits for trucks and the amount of time a driver can legally spend on the road without taking a rest stop. The software should do this automatically without any work needed on the part of the fleet manager.

As can be seen, scheduling is an extremely important part of running a vehicle fleet, especially a truck fleet where delivery times are of paramount importance. A piece of fleet scheduling software should give a fleet manager an easy-to-read overview, both in graphic and written report form, of both long and short term schedules and the performance of the fleet overall and on an individual vehicle level. By keeping in mind the points above, a fleet manager should be able to find a fleet scheduling software package that keeps his fleet running to schedule without cost implications or breaking transport regulations.