By Josh Crompton,
Managing Director, Ausfleet
The question I hear most from fleet leaders is not about the next feature. It is a simple one. “Will this platform still cope when things get messy?”
When systems slow down or fail during a busy period, it hits safety, service levels, and trust, not to mention team productivity and overall satisfaction.
From my point of view, three elements matter most for resilience in this setting: real problems from the front line, simple use of data, and a strong core fleet platform.
Why resilience matters now
Fleet operators feel pressure from many sides – rising fuel and insurance costs; new safety, compliance and emissions rules. It is hard to find and keep good employees who are key to service deliver. Customer/stakeholder expectations are increasing, wanting accurate ETAs, digital proof of service, clear insightful reporting all within a condensed timeframe.
To survive you can cut spend for a quarter, pausing hiring and delaying maintenance. That may give some short-term relief to address these challenges, but it opens up medium to longer term risks and makes the business fragile.
Research backs this up. A Boston Consulting Group study on “all weather” companies (specifically those businesses that invest in their capacity to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances), found that performance during crisis has almost three times the impact of performance compared to “stable periods”. The report goes on to highlight that organisations which invest in resilience and their ability to adapt during periods of high demand and stress recover faster and create stronger long-term value with their staff and customers than those that focus only on short-term.
In our industry, fleet managers that focus on service delivery for customers during disruption, need software providers that streamline process, use data to create insight and support fleet managers to make informed decisions quickly, and ultimately gain gain an edge that lasts beyond one crisis.
Principle 1: Start with what slows people down
One practice that works well is what I call a “week of problems.” For one week, ask drivers, schedulers, and workshop teams the same question at the end of each shift:
“What slowed you down today?”
Collect answers without debate. At the end of the week, group them into themes such as safety, downtime, business process inefficiency or billing, cost and invoicing errors. Pick one theme and design a short trial with a single measure.
For example, you might change the pre-start checklist in one depot and track near misses and delays before and after.
An external fleet technology partner like AusFleet can help by setting up a simple way to capture issues and connecting it to your systems for interrogation. Your people still own the problems and the ideas. The partner only adds structure and mechanism to take an informed action.
Principle 2: Make data a part of the daily rhythm
Most fleets collect telematics, maintenance, and fuel data. The gap is connecting this all together and using that data to guide more informed action.
One customer I work with runs a short “data huddle” each morning. The team looks at three numbers: planned service completion rates, cost of downtime, and unplanned workshop visits. They discuss what changed since yesterday and agree on a few actions (less than three) for that day to improve the status quo.
A recent case study done by GeoTAB on Dubbo City Council, (also a AusFleet customer) highlights this further. The story showcases how connecting systems (like AusFleet and GeoTAB) to collect data saved Dubbo $180,000 in fuel and maintenance cost.
A specialist partner like AusFleet connects telematics, workshop data, and fleet costs data from record of truth to build a simple scorecard and automate alerts. That frees teams from chasing spreadsheets and keeps focus on decisions.
Principle 3: Strengthen the core platform before it breaks
Resilience also depends on whether your core platform can cope when volumes spike or a crisis hits.
A few years ago, we saw that our own hosting model needed modernising. Our platform served fleets across several sectors, yet our on-premise set up had grown in patches over time. We were running more than a hundred database servers. Peak loads were hard to predict and our engineers weren’t getting the time they deserved to improve the product.
We worked with a specialist cloud partner and moved our core platform to Microsoft Azure. The work covered database consolidation, Azure virtual machines tuned to our stack, security posture improvement and a full automated backup and recovery. The cutover was planned so that customers felt absolutely no disruption and was a complete success.
The results were clear. Infrastructure costs dropped by close to half. Uptime and system output rose as the platform could scale with demand. Manual server work disappeared, and our teams could focus again on features that matter to our customers.
That cloud move is one example, yet it shows how a single decision, guided by resilience, can change the way you respond to pressure, and I feel like we are only just getting started.
A simple path for fleet leaders
You do not need a large costly program of work to begin. Think big but start small. Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.
Over the next 90 days, you can:
- Run a week of problems and choose one theme for a small trial.
- Agree on a short list of daily metrics linked to safety, uptime, performance or perhaps customer service KPI’s.
- Start a regular data huddle with front line teams and capture what’s slowing them down.
- Review your core systems and ask where they would bend first under stress.
Resilience in fleet management grows from many small, practical decisions that make your business a little stronger each day, supported by a core platform (like AusFleet) that can keep going when the pressure rises.