2022 Ford F-250

Imagine it’s a Monday morning, and your fleet of 100 construction vehicles is ready to hit the road. You’ve got a bunch of active job orders, and one of them is pretty critical: your concrete mixer truck needs to be at a construction site by 8 a.m. sharp.

Idle fleet vehicles draining money, drivers taking hour-long detours to lunch, traffic jams derailing schedules, maintenance issues snowballing into bills with multiple zeros… If you’re nodding along to these fleet management issues, you’re not alone.

What does it take to develop a fleet management budget that will support you on the way to your business goals? In this short guide will cover the determining aspects you should keep in mind and strategies to employ when drawing up a fleet budget. But first, let’s clarify — why is it imperative to have one? 🤔

Most "fleet management software" was built for long-haul trucking or service vehicles — construction is the asset-mixed reality in between, and most vendors treat it as an afterthought. Here are the four capabilities that actually matter for a construction fleet, starting with dispatch, plus an honest vendor-by-vendor look at how Samsara, Motive, Fleetio, Verizon Connect, Tenna, and Fleet Chaser handle each.

Most dispatchers still drag tomorrow's jobs onto the board every morning. Schedule Automation removes the ritual — set a rule on a workflow once, and planned tasks promote themselves onto the active board when their start time is near. It reacts when plans change, and you can still promote any job by hand in one click.

Route Planning turns a multi-stop job from "an address typed into the task description" into a real itinerary you draw on a map. Color-coded Load, Delivery, and Job Site checkpoints, drag to reorder, addresses or saved Locations, and an Employee App that walks the driver through the route in order — including the Job Site stops that hold the line until the work there is logged.

Unexpected downtime presents a tangible setback for your fleet. Not only is your asset now off the road, but you have to tweak your operations and allocate finances to accommodate for it.

With simplified Global Search, every team member who will be interacting with the software will save valuable time — and, in the long run, all those shortcuts add up, enabling you to focus longer on making crucial decisions for business prosperity, rather than just managing operations.

We are excited to introduce Fleet Chaser Chat, a brand-new feature designed to enhance communication and collaboration within your company. Whether you're coordinating fleet operations, managing employees, or discussing important updates, our chat functionality is built to support your needs.