End of the year is the time for budgeting. Generating of a budget for fleet operations is a daunting challenge for each company. The reason is clear. There are numerous factors that need to be considered, they are interlinked in such a way that makes it almost impossible to predict every type of expense.
In the following article, I will spell out the major factors affecting the fleet operational costs. I will also describe how this difficult task became very easy and straight forward with Eagle-i.
The major factors in making the right budget are as follow:
- Fuel Cost: varies according to the total number of assets, utilization of each asset, distance traveled by each asset, type of asset (Light/Heavy), load and the way asset is driven (harsh driving and over-speeding drastically increase the fuel consumption).
- Renewal Cost: such as document renewals, vehicle insurance, vehicle registration, driver license, driver official papers (Iqama, insurance etc..).
- Maintenance Cost: including periodic service and fixing. Preventive maintenances are usually projectable. Some of the maintenances are time-based (e.g. Engine General Inspection). But most of the maintenances are distance or utilization based (e.g. Oil Change @ every 5000KM). It is hard to project such costs as it is dependent on many factors like distance traveled and the way vehicle was driven (harsh braking, harsh acceleration, over-speeding drastically reduce the asset performance and life, creating a need of more frequent workshop visits and parts replacements).
- There are unforeseen expenses that may incur for example road accidents. So keeping a log of accidents helps to evaluate a cushion in the budget for unforeseen expenses.
The key to effortless budgeting is close monitoring of fleet operation, and logging the expenses accordingly. On the same foundation, Eagle-I has developed its Service/Renewal Module, which let the fleet owner enter invoices (fuel, renewals, and maintenance), it also provides an overview of total expenses incurred for a single asset, multiple assets and whole fleet – each month and for last 12 months.
Here one may ask how Eagle-I Service/Renewal module is different from any off-the-shelf fleet maintenance software. The answer is simple but the results are enormous. Eagle-I incorporates the telematics data (asset utilization, driving behavior, distance traveled etc) with the operational expenses, offering its users a cost-benefit analysis on single click, for whole fleet operation over a period of one year.
Read also (on blog.dms-ksa.com):
Preventive maintenance: A new trend in Fleet Maintenance
Following is a brief on the Eagle-I’s unique and powerful budgeting tool:
The module is divided into different tabs:
- Overview
- Maintenance Logs
- Renewal Logs
- Accident Logs
- Service Schedules