7 tips for an efficient freight transport operation

Everything you need to make a freight transport operation more efficient is here. Take a look!

There are many demands in a freight transport company. Routine activities to complete, unforeseen fleet events, management of driver, maintenance and support teams, and so many other tasks that arise throughout the day.

Each type of operation has its own particularities, but one of the biggest challenges in all this is staying efficient. In this text, we bring some important tips on how to act proactively to maintain efficiency.

Manage costs

Salaries, fuel, tires, documents and licenses are just a few examples of the many costs of freight transport.

The first step toward managing them is to identify all cost drivers within the operation and classify them as fixed and variable costs, keeping records of every company expense or investment.

This makes it possible to establish and analyze the relationship between cost and the result obtained from each vehicle, department or part, also in line with the desired strategy.

Some technologies can be allies in optimizing processes and reducing unwanted costs that ultimately weigh on the company's budget.

AgileProcess, for example, has a route planning tool capable of reducing the kilometers traveled between deliveries, increasing driver productivity and also reducing fleet idle time.

Manage tasks

It could be a board, a task manager, a workflow defined in a written document shared with the team or, in the best scenario, fleet management software.

The most important thing is to have a well-structured process. A good methodology to use as a basis for creating this process is 5W2H. This method considers that, to carry out a task or project, 7 basic items should be defined.

They are:

1. What (what will be done?)
2. Why (why?)
3. Where (where?)
4. When (when?)
5. Who (by whom?)
6. How (how?)
7. How much (how much will it cost?)

After these are defined, everyone should follow the process, and it is important to have records of everything that was done.

Establish a preventive maintenance schedule

Unforeseen events are certainly among the factors that most harm planning.

Keeping fleet vehicle maintenance at regular intervals is an important practice for minimizing unwanted events.

Likewise, it is important to perform it strategically and systematically. In other words, teams and managers should be able to define a schedule that organizes and prioritizes the maintenance area's work orders. This ensures that the most critical items have priority, but also that all vehicles are always in order.

Beyond these action tips, the most important thing will always be managers' overall view of the operation and careful analysis of data, information and the context in which they are operating when making decisions.

Complete vehicle checklists

Breakdowns, mechanical failures and other fleet unavailability, even for short periods, disrupt the operation's flow.

A checklist is a good way to keep close track of the fleet's condition. By defining a list of items essential for vehicles to be driven and establishing a routine to check their condition, you ensure safety for the company and its employees.

This also minimizes unforeseen events and avoids possible conflicts and unfair assignment of responsibility for vehicle damage.

Standardize fleet processes

Standardizing means teaching all employees to follow the same practices to perform a given task. A management system facilitates this type of action, but spreadsheets can also be an alternative.

Another facilitator of standardization is a fleet policy. With it, everyone will know how to act in all situations and what care is needed for vehicles and maintenance schedules.

Understand efficiency indicators

When we talk about efficiency, we are talking directly about the transport operation's productivity. How much your team can accomplish in X time, how much your fleet can transport with X vehicles, among other information.

Using KPIs to keep track of progress and establish new fleet goals and actions is essential. In this case, to measure your operations' efficiency, you can keep an eye on metrics such as:

• average job completion time;
• goods unloading time;
• number of trips in X weeks;
• among others.

Automate processes

Although you can use spreadsheets and other resources to control the fleet and what happens in each freight transport operation, the ideal is to have a system that automates your processes.

Instead of completing the checklist manually on paper, then entering it in a spreadsheet so you can check and analyze all the data yourself at the end of the month, you can invest in an electronic checklist that will be filled in during the check and updated in real time for all employees as the inspection is recorded.

So automation is the best way to increase and maintain your freight transport operation's efficiency.

Want to know how Prolog can help you more? See our tire management solution! (in Portuguese)