Ensuring your fleet stays moving when incidents occur is one of the key ingredients to a successful and efficient business.
Limiting downtime can lead to significantly lower costs, allowing your drivers to remain on the road and continue delivering your company's services.
This blog post explores how to master fleet accident management and how working with an incident management provider can reduce downtime and cut costs.
- Understanding the impact of driver downtime
- Why your fleet should have an incident management solution
- What makes an effective incident management solution?
- Outsourcing your incident management solution
- What do we offer?
Understanding the impact of driver downtime
Minimising driver downtime is one of the core goals for fleets, as it can significantly impact business efficiency and costs. Estimates for fleet downtime costs can exceed £700 a day in lost productivity per vehicle, plus any subsequent repair costs.
When your drivers can't work due to incidents, it can lead to consequential delays, lower productivity and increased costs.
Customers can then become dissatisfied due to these delays, negatively impacting your fleet's reputation.
On top of this, if you don't handle incidents effectively, your company can also experience financial losses from repairs, insurance claims and legal liabilities.
For these reasons alone, rigorous planning for when incidents occur is essential, helping you reduce downtime and minimise costs.
Reduce fleet downtime with our handy guide.
Small-to-medium sized fleets can lose up to five working days a year due to traffic incidents.
Make sure your fleet isn't one of them.
Download our guide for five top tips on reducing downtime for your fleet.
Minimise vehicle downtime and keep your business moving forward, 365 days a year.
Why your fleet should have an incident management solution
So, what can your fleet do to help combat these issues and deal with incidents swiftly and effectively?
Road accidents can cost your fleet thousands of pounds yearly due to repair costs, insurance premiums and downtime, so keeping them to a minimum is essential.
Fleet accident management solutions allow you to assess the situation quickly, coordinate effectively with your drivers and the relevant authorities — and get your vehicles back on the road.
Incident management solutions streamline the communication, documentation and recovery processes, minimising the impacts of incidents on overall fleet operations. In addition to this, they can facilitate easy KPI reporting, resolve mobility issues and even offer legal solutions.
What makes an effective incident management solution?
For your incident management solution to be effective, several components must all work together to minimise downtime.
It should include a comprehensive accident reporting system, where drivers can quickly and accurately report any incidents that occur on the road.
With this in place, you can have information on incidents as and when they happen, allowing you to initiate the necessary actions to deal with them swiftly.
You'll also require a robust communication system that allows drivers, fleet managers, insurance providers and repair services to communicate seamlessly with each other.
With an effective solution, all the necessary parties will be well informed when an incident occurs, allowing everyone to collaborate effectively to resolve it.
Your solution may also include telematics and GPS tracking to monitor fleet movement, identify potential risks and provide real-time updates. These components work together to ensure a swift and efficient response to accidents.
All of the above can work towards making your fleet more efficient, but how do you implement them into your fleet?
This is where incident management companies can step in, allowing you to outsource your entire fleet accident management process.
Outsourcing your incident management solution
Implementing an incident management solution into your fleet requires careful planning and execution.
Thankfully, you can outsource your full end-to-end incident management process, allowing you to focus on growing your business while your fleet stays moving.
By working closely with an incident management provider, the responsibility of dealing with accidents will be taken away from the fleet manager, allowing more time to focus on other areas of the company.
Incident management companies can often open the door to fully managed repair networks and supply chain services across the country, significantly reducing the downtime caused by an incident.
Combine this with non-fault replacement vehicle services and your fleet's overall downtime will reduce significantly.
Overall, outsourcing your solution reduces unexpected costs caused by accidents, minimises downtime due to the repair and replacement services available, and allows you to benefit from tested, efficient and highly configurable technology.
What do we offer?
Motor Assist looks at incident management in a different way from the rest. We believe you should only pay for the services you need rather than pre-determined packages that might not suit your fleet.
This is why we offer a fully modular approach to incident management that allows you to build a solution that fits the needs of your fleet.
With 20-plus years of industry experience and over 580 repair partners, we have the tools, people and technology to keep your fleet moving in times of need.
Want to discover your ideal solution? Our Solution Finder asks you a few simple questions about your business and provides you with a tailored package for your fleet.
