The Benefits of Small Business Asset Management
While small business asset management has several benefits, we can categorize all these benefits into four main points:
- Asset management software can save your business a lot of time and money
- Asset tracking can make your business more secure for both your employees and your assets
- The technology can give the business-critical data that you can use to grow and develop your company.
- Using asset management now when your business is small can make business growth and expansion easier for you down the road.
Let us explore each of these points and see how you can apply asset management in your business’s day-to-day operations.
How Asset Management Software Can Save You Time and Money
Time and money are essential resources for a business, and fleet managers often juggle these two, usually giving up one in favor of another. A typical example is how small businesses would forgo automation and choose to do things manually instead. While it helps you save money because new technology means new costs, doing things manually means more time is taken away from you.
Less Need For Paperwork
Asset tracking systems are time-savers because they automate a lot of business processes that are often time-consuming. Everybody hates manually filling out paperwork. Without this technology, much paperwork needs to be done to keep track of orders, routes, and driver activity. Drivers, in particular, are not fond of having to fill out paperwork before they leave for a job and again once they come back from it. Asset tracking automatically sends out data to either your app or your PC. These can be collected, eliminating the need for a lot of paperwork.
Automate Daily Business Processes
Because it automates many processes, it also makes the job easier for people running the admin side of things. As a fleet manager, you have a plethora of responsibilities at work. You have to resolve disputes, manage all employees, gather and keep company records, and maintain the efficiency of business processes. Because asset tracking automates many of these business processes, you don’t have to spend a lot of time on routine work and concentrate your efforts on growing the business.
Reduces Fuel Costs
For fleet managers, one of the most significant expenses is fuel costs. Asset tracking can help reduce your fleet’s fuel consumption by ensuring that your drivers are mindful of preserving fuel while on the road. For example, many drivers keep the engine running during idle periods, which consumes a lot of fuel.
Save Money on Vehicle Maintenance and Repairs
Aside from fuel costs, vehicle repair and maintenance is another area that asset management can help with. With asset trackers, you can set maintenance schedules for each of your vehicles. Regular maintenance ensures that cars are in top shape while on the road, reducing the risks of the vehicles breaking down while they’re on their routes. Maintenance costs are always lower compared to the costs associated with repairing broken-down cars.
Build a Secure Workplace with Small Business Asset Tracking
Fleet managers need to ensure that they’re running a secure workplace because all resources are essential for small businesses. If your resources are already limited, losing more resources due to negligence or theft can spell out enormous losses for your company.
Vehicle theft is a legitimate concern for fleet managers. With asset tracking, you can pinpoint the exact location of your vehicle so you can give law enforcement the vital information they need to apprehend the perpetrator and get your car back.
Asset management also makes your workplace secure for your other most important asset – your drivers. Before this technology, fleet managers had no clue what their drivers are up to while they are on the road. With asset management, you can even gauge their driving behaviors. While a lot of drivers may see it as intrusive, tracking can also help keep them safe.
Data-Driven Small Businesses Are Geared For Success
Data is vital, and the company that holds the most information is geared for success. While most fleet managers use asset tracking for security purposes, the data collected from GPS tracking can also help business owners make critical decisions.
Deliver Better Customer Service
Asset tracking can help companies deliver better customer service. If you receive negative feedback from customers, you can compare it with the data you have to see where the company went wrong. For example, the customer may have complained that the driver took too long to arrive. In this case, you can check the driver’s route and see how long it took them to arrive at their destination. Your driver may have encountered traffic along the way, or maybe they made a detour for personal purposes. You can decide on the best course of action based on what the data shows.
Improve Efficiency in Business Operations
No business starts at total efficiency, and small companies usually have their strengths and weaknesses. However, data reporting can give you critical insight into areas where your company can improve and be more efficient. For example, suppose your company vehicles take too long before arriving at their destination because of their routes. In that case, you can use that data and revise your vehicle’s routes, so it avoids traffic-heavy areas.
Make Important Business Purchase Decisions
Data reporting can help your company make wise purchase decisions. Based on the data you have gathered; you can see what your company needs the most and what it doesn’t. For example, if you are a moving company, and you see that your small vans see more use than your larger trucks, you can look at the data to know why this is the case. Suppose the data shows that most of your customers only want small trucks because they only need to move a few possessions. In that case, you may decide to purchase more small vans in the future because of customer demand.
Data Makes Marketing Efforts More Efficient
Asset tracking data can also show you where you need to focus your marketing efforts. Taking the example used above, if you see that your company isn’t getting much use out of your larger trucks, this doesn’t mean you should sell your large trucks or leave them as is. Instead, you can run promos or discounts on heavy load or long-distance moving services, usually requiring large trucks to pull off.
It Helps Prepare your Company for Growth
Understandably, you’d only want the bare necessities for your business when you are first starting out. Unfortunately, many small business owners forgo asset management because they see themselves as too small for it or feel that it’s something that they can integrate later in their business. However, asset management is a technology that grows with you. Fleetr’s asset management solutions only charge a small subscription fee per month. In addition, you only need to purchase the number of asset trackers you need. This means you can choose to purchase only a couple of trackers when your business starts out and buy more in the future as you acquire more vehicles in your fleet.
Contrary to popular belief, starting your business with asset tracking makes the transition easier. If you do without asset management, it means all your data collection and keeping is done manually. When you do decide to start with asset management solutions in the future, this means you’ll have to transfer and transcribe all previously gathered data into the new system. It also means you’ll have to completely change many company policies to cater to this new technology. In the end, you’ll be spending a lot of time in transition with data entry, training personnel, and creating new policies for your company. Using asset management from the beginning eliminates all this. It ensures that your business growth and development are smooth and hassle-free.
Those are just some of the benefits that small businesses can get from implementing asset management solutions. Remember, this technology can do wonders for your business, and there’s no such thing as being “too small” for something that can give you a lot of growth and success.
