Fleet KPIs and Benchmarking
At the recent Plant and Fleet Management Workshops, attendees were asked to complete a survey on the Top 10 KPIs listed in the IPWEA Fleet Plant and Vehicle Management Manual (PVMM).
Performance measures are so important that the first section of the (PVMM) provides the Top 10 Key Performance Indicators for Plant and Vehicle Management. Measuring and reporting on these 10 KPIs is considered best practice fleet management and form the basis of developing a Fleet Asset Management Plan (FAMP) which is outlined in Chapter 1 of the PVMM.
Chapter 13 of the PVMM outlines the reason for creating KPIs for your fleet and quotes management guru Peter Drucker who said, “Unless we determine what shall be measured and what the yardstick of measurement in an area will be, the area itself will not be seen.”
Being seen, or included in management discussions, is one of the biggest challenges for the fleet team in any organisation. If you don’t measure the performance of your fleet assets, and share the improvements across your organisation, the fleet department won’t be seen.
The Top 10 KPIs listed in the PVMM are:
1. Utilisation
2. Optimum Asset Replacement
3. Whole-of-Life Cost
4. Availability and/or downtime
5. Maintenance failures (fault repairs)
6. Flat-rates or estimated repair times
7. Scheduled to unscheduled maintenance ratio
8. Scheduled preventative maintenance program compliance
9. Repair turnaround time
10. Downtime cost
In the survey completed by the attendees at the Workshops, 93% of organisations measure Utilisation, 67% measure Whole-of-Life-Costs, while only 50% measure Optimum Asset Replacement.
Collecting and accessing data was the main reason people weren’t tracking each of the Top 10 KPIs. The other reason was time. People are busy ‘doing’ the fleet management and there was no time left to prepare reports which indicates fleet people are reacting to the demands of their customers rather than managing the expectations of senior management.
The other insight that came from the survey was the level of knowledge on how to measure the Top 10 fleet management KPIs.
For example, Optimum Asset Replacement, the common response was five years or 100,000 kilometres. This is a generic replacement policy rather than a KPI. The two measurements for this KPI outlined in the PVMM are:
1. Percentage of assets replaced on schedule
2. Average age of fleet by category
Note: IPWEA Fleet Consultant, Please contact Ken Goldberg, will be reaching out to organisations that completed the survey starting with fleet practitioners that are measuring the most common KPIs. The intention will be to promote participation in a simple but effective benchmarking framework that will help practitioners rank against other organisations, track progress, and reach goals faster.