Key performance indexes (KPIs) are great for comparing where you are from where you want to be when it comes to delivery management. They help you figure out how you’re faring against industry benchmarks, and they help you track your fleet performance over time. By keeping track of your fleet KPIs you can identify pain points and address them to reduce cost, increase customer satisfaction and improve profit margins.
The question is: which KPIs are actually worth tracking with your fleet software system?
Below are the important KPIs you must track to improve fleet operations.
There are plenty of KPIs you can track—and it’s important to choose them wisely according to your business objectives and goals. Begin with what the senior management is looking for and prioritize KPIs from the broad ones to the more detailed ones. Experts say that 10 to 20 KPIs are the ideal number for most companies.
When tracking KPIs, make sure that you are prioritizing processes and operations and that your metrics are relevant. Choosing the right KPIs to monitor helps you get a clear picture of the health of your delivery processes and uncover potential areas for improvement. Keep in mind that KPIs are not set in stone, and you may need to assess them periodically and make adjustments.
Similarly, your metrics shouldn’t be static—you also need to raise the bar once you've met your KPI targets or have exceeded them. Here, having a metric scorecard can be highly beneficial. Ideally, you’d be able to customize reports within your fleet tracking software based on your specified KPIs and parameters, then set them to run automatically on a regular basis.
At this point you might be thinking—that’s all well and good in theory, but whenever I’ve tried to measure these metrics in the past it’s taken a Herculean effort. Unfortunately, that’s something we hear way too frequent. Large, tech-savvy enterprises still find themselves in positions where legacy last mile or other software is causing data silos. It’s also not uncommon to find that your fancy software solutions for different touchpoints simply don’t play well together. In situations like these, you sometimes wind up with shadow IT (i.e. technology that isn’t officially sanctioned by the organization, but that folks feel they need in order to do their jobs). This can exacerbate these problems even further.
The right fleet tracking tool should make it easy to integrate with other solutions (e.g. PoS or WMS) and centralize all of your relevant data in one place. From there, it should provide you with the flexibility to create and develop your metrics, get the data you need when you need it, and run reports that actually reflect your business goals. This way, you can spot bottlenecks more easily and gain a clearer picture of your overall fleet performance.
To stay ahead of the competition today, effectively measuring your performance has never been more important. Tracking the right metrics efficiently and diligently will help you identify and resolve the issues that often cause customer satisfaction to decrease or operating costs to increase—or both.