Developing a fleet planning process is crucial for determining how your fleet will proceed for the year ahead. You certainly don’t want your fleet floundering when it comes to its business strategies. Therefore, coming up with a solid plan each year should be one of your fleet’s top priorities. Doing this will help you manage the changes that come each year, encourage improvement, maintain a positive influence and reputation, and promote self-sufficiency. If you’re wondering how to get started, don’t worry, we’re here to help. Here are some tips on developing a strategic business plan for your business.
1. Define Your Business
You’ll first need to define your business in terms that will help you move forward with a business strategy. These terms include:
- Ongoing business activities: These may include activities like vehicle operation management or fleet financial management
- Management authority: Management authority may include fleet management organizations or fleet user organizations.
- Management roles: Examples of roles include day-to-day oversight of business activities or policy and procedure development.
- Management responsibilities: Some of these responsibilities or assignments may include finance/accounting or risk management.
2. Identify Needed Improvements and Set Priorities
There are two steps involved in this part of the process. We will break them down below.
Define a Methodology
You’ll need to consider specific attributes or characteristics of your business and find a means of defining the importance of these characteristics relative to each other. It’s a good idea to rate each attribute, giving each one an “excellent, good, fair, or poor” quality rating.
Apply Your Methodology to All Business Practices
Apply this methodology to each business practice in at least two distinct areas. Once you have begun to instill your methodology, you should start to see improvements.
3. Develop an Action Plan
When developing an action plan, you should determine what specific tasks and subtasks need to be performed. You’ll also want to consider what resources you need, both internally and externally.
Be sure that you assign responsibility for different parts of your action plan so everyone knows who is responsible for what. Everyone needs to understand expectations, so set a reasonable timeline with milestones along the way where everyone can check their work.
Here are some other factors you should consider when developing your action plan:
- Technical rigor
- Publicity
- Achievable goals
- Concrete action plans
- Plan maintenance
- Stakeholder involvement
- Recognition of political realities
- Implementable strategies
- Measurement of results
If you take all of these ideas into account, you’re sure to develop a solid action plan that your fleet can thrive on.
Develop Your Fleet’s Plan Today!
With these steps, your team can develop an actionable business plan to find success in the year to come. Follow our blog for more tips on all things fleet management. Remember to track your fleet’s data throughout the year so you can easily identify problems and know what goals to set for the business each year. Azuga’s fleet management software can help you track all the data you need to succeed. Try out a demo today and see what you’re missing.
