Module III - The motorpool money-saver: Is it the right approach for your fleet?
On the road to lower fleet costs, operating a motorpool can save you money. But how do you go about efficiently sharing multiple fleet vehicles amongst your drivers?
With ever-mounting pressures to reduce costs, maintain efficiency and keep up with aging infrastructure, your agency already has lots of essential services to keep track of, let alone stay updated on its fleet operations. Given these pressures, many agencies are implementing motorpools and digital key management to cut back on fleet costs.
A motorpool strategy is a plan for short-term vehicle sharing. Motorpools serve as a cost-efficient option for government agencies because they help them maintain right-sized fleets and prevent the potential of experiencing over- or underutilization, if managed efficiently. While there are key advantages to operating a government motorpool, there are several challenges that can surface if left unaddressed. This module will unearth these common problems, explain how telematics can solve them and provide insight on the benefits of keyless options for motorpool-based fleets.
Modern challenges with government motorpool strategies
An effective motorpool strategy can save your agency money on registration, insurance and fuel costs, not to mention time. However, in order to prime your motorpool for success, it’s important to know the common pitfalls associated with managing a shared fleet before rolling out your strategy and find ways to mitigate them. These issues can undermine your cost-savings goals and strain your agency’s budget, if left unaccounted for.
The top four most common challenges facing government motorpools are:
- Inefficient key management: Planning physical car key pick-up and drop-off times can be tricky and time consuming, particularly if a vehicle is needed after typical operating hours conclude. Manual key swaps like these can bog down the efficiency of your processes and make running a motorpool counterproductive.
- Influxes of paperwork: Sharing vehicles either within a department or between different departments in your agency can naturally create more administrative work for your employees. Scheduling or coordinating the use of the motorpool and spending time completing paperwork before releasing a shared vehicle to its next driver can cause unwarranted vehicle downtime and increase administrative costs.
- Total cost of ownership (TCO) increases: Total cost of ownership (TCO) describes the lifetime cost associated with a vehicle, factoring in buying, maintenance, fuel and other ownership expenses. TCO can be inconsistent across your entire motorpool if your vehicles have wildly different usage rates.
- Unoptimized expenses: Yearly labor and maintenance costs may be higher than necessary for your motorpool if it isn’t right-sized. For example, parked vehicles that aren’t operated frequently can have their batteries die, resulting in regular jumpstarting costs.
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) reports that nationwide, state and local governments annually spend over $2.5 billion on their fleets.
What does an effective government motorpool strategy look like?
As previously mentioned, a motorpool strategy can be immensely beneficial for your agency’s fleet if it’s deployed correctly. To avoid financial risk, it’s smart to be proactively aware of the challenges a motorpool can present beforehand and come up with ways to mitigate them.
Take these steps to develop a motorpool strategy that’s free of waste and enables your agency’s budget to go further.
Step 1 - Fleet optimization
- Optimize utilization rates: Closely monitor your vehicles’ utilization metrics and look for ways to equalize your shared vehicles’ usage. Evening usage helps keep your vehicles’ maintenance costs more uniform and reduces your potential for higher expenses in certain vehicles for larger repairs.
- Right-size your fleet: Where it makes sense, remove severely under-used vehicles from your fleet. Save on insurance, maintenance and vehicle registration costs by having an ideal number of vehicles to carry out your agency’s operations.
- Retain needed vehicles: Make sure the most critical vehicles are available whenever they’re needed. Some assets—such as emergency vehicles—are essential to your operations, even if they’re only occasionally used. By reserving specific vehicles for certain scenarios, you’ll never have to worry about them being unavailable when a crisis strikes. Additionally, examine whether or not you have the right vehicle types and classes available for your operations. For example, if your fleet has 10 sedans available, but you notice a shortage of pickup vehicles, your fleet isn’t properly equipped to meet your agency’s directives and you’ll want to account for this in your motorpool strategy.
- Determine location requirements: Are your vehicles located where they are needed most? Verifying that your vehicles are near where most of your agency's employees are placed can help reduce the time it takes for them to access a vehicle. If you share a motorpool across multiple departments, leverage your utilization data to properly allocate vehicles across locations.
- Technology implementation Decide whether or not it makes sense to integrate a fleet management solution into your operations. By partnering with a telematics provider, you can track vehicle usage, identify inefficient processes and reduce fuel consumption with total visibility into your fleet operations.
Step 2: Roll-out strategy
- Key management strategy: Decide how the keys for your vehicles will be handled and managed. Should you acquire a digital key solution, or handle keys manually? If vehicles are needed after hours or on weekends, or if they need to be dropped off after hours, this needs to be addressed in your motorpool strategy. You don’t want to be stuck in a situation where a driver requires access to a vehicle and the office is closed or the driver left with the key as the office was closed. Scenarios like these can result in lost productivity, as drivers need access to vehicles at the time the job needs to be done.
- Implementation strategy: Who will manage the implementation project and monitor it so it stays on track? How will installs be handled and how do your vehicles need to be positioned for an easy roll-out? Asking these questions as part of your motorpool strategy will help you account for unforeseen issues before they arise, set clear expectations and guide a smoother implementation process.
- Vehicle reservation strategy: Once your motorpool strategy is in place, decide how vehicle reservations will be managed (will they be manual or automated?) and who will be in charge of them. Also consider the costs for a new reservation system if you don’t already have one in place. Many agencies attempt to manage motorpools manually, using spreadsheets, emails and physical key exchanges. These disjointed manual processes can result in inefficiencies like excessive time spent managing vehicles, limited understanding of the types and numbers of vehicles needed and expensive carrying costs (with no metrics for fleet composition decision-making). By introducing an online reservation and tracking system, you can reduce errors and minimize the amount of time employees spend handling reservations. But that’s not even the best part: Automation allows for tracking usage and vehicle types more accurately, helping you improve your motorpool strategy by properly allocating resources. Digital motorpool management systems can be particularly helpful for organizations with multiple motorpool sites, erasing physical boundaries and encouraging shared resources.
The Geotab approach to shared fleets
Geotab’s Keyless is a customized, digitized Keyless solution built on top of Geotab’s telematics solution. The ecosystem helps your drivers have access to the vehicle they need – right when they need it. The Keyless solution is customizable with your choice of hardware, Keyless entry, remote monitor add-ins and an integrated software reservation partner.
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How Geotab Keyless works
By placing your vehicle key within the keyless hardware and easily connecting it to a Geotab GO device, vehicle access can be granted wirelessly, free of the need to meet in person for a scheduled key drop-off. In the Geotab Drive app, authorized drivers are given vehicle access nearly instantly to locate, lock and unlock approved agency vehicles, regardless of data connectivity. In cases where mobile access isn’t realistic or permissible, additional options allow drivers to unlock their assigned vehicles with tap card access. NFC readers can safely be mounted to vehicles’ windshields, and when compatible tap cards are passed over top of them, lock functionalities can be toggled.
To keep your motorpool vehicles protected against theft or unauthorized usage, Keyless Monitor enables you to control, configure and watch over your Keyless hardware options with ease. Geotab’s Keyless functionalities also offer rich integrations via our diverse ecosystem of reservation software partners. Syncing vehicle reservation data with our keyless tools allows for vehicle access to be managed automatically, saving you time and the headaches of coordinating multiple vehicle schedules manually. No matter if you choose to work directly with one of our partners on the Geotab Marketplace or integrate a solution directly into your own platform, you’re in capable hands.
The benefits of going keyless
Reduced key management costs
Increased fleet utilization
Enhanced security and theft prevention
