It's time to make improvements to your fleet to reduce its carbon emissions. This might be because of your organisation’s own sustainability goals, pressure from your supply chain, or your own belief that your fleet operations should be less impactful.
And it’s a sensible strategy. When fleets improve their sustainability performance, they also invariably improve productivity, service efficiency, vehicle health, driver safety, and reduce operating costs. So it’s something of a no-brainer really!
So, now that you’ve decided to work towards making your fleet greener, where do you begin?
1. Understand the metrics that affect your fleet’s carbon footprint
Fuel efficiency, or economy can be affected by a number of factors, and each fleet may be more affected by one or another, which is why you’ll need to spend some time understanding your own specific challenges. Some examples are:
Excessive idling - any time that the engine’s running and the vehicle’s not covering any mileage, you’re wasting fuel and creating unnecessary emissions of carbon dioxide, as well as other environmentally and human health-impacting emissions.
Driving styles - if your drivers are driving aggressively, they will be impacting their fuel economy and increasing carbon emissions. Excessive speeding and harsh acceleration and braking are core KPIs to track and feedback to drivers to improve your fleet’s sustainability performance. Focusing on these metrics will also improve your drivers’ safety performance, reducing the likelihood of collisions and improving your brand reputation.
Vehicle loading - are your vehicles carrying lots of heavy stock that’s barely used? Additional payload will pull your fuel economy down, limiting the capacity of your drivers to improve this metric.
Vehicle health - when vehicles are well maintained, their fuel economy will be better. A strong preventative maintenance program can improve fuel economy by between 5 and 10%.
On top of these, there are other factors that can be managed to reduce the carbon intensity of your fleet. Some of these include:
Route planning - if dispatch, or your drivers, are planning their routes inefficiently, then your fleet will be burning excessive fuel even when your fuel economy stats seem good.
Right sizing - if a heavier vehicle is completing work that could be carried out by a lighter vehicle, you could again be burning more fuel than necessary.
Vehicle utilisation and productivity - how many empty miles are your fleet undertaking? What capacity are they operating at? Are multi shipments being carried out wherever possible, or are you completing lots of miles for single shipments? This will massively affect your mileage per tonne.
2. Collect baseline data
Before you go rushing to implement a bunch of improvements (more on this next), take the time to collect some data to see how your fleet is performing now. If you’ve had your telematics system installed across the fleet for a while, this will just require you to pull some reports for the last 6 months or so.
The longer you can take the data from, the better, since this will flatten out any seasonal fluctuations in operational activity.
If your telematics system is freshly installed, then you’ll need to hang fire while it collects your fleet’s data. Three months should suffice if you’re in a rush to get started.
The more granular the data can be at source, the better - while it’s important to get fleet averages for your key performance metrics, it’s also important to drill into the data per vehicle, and per driver (where they aren’t assigned on a 1:1 ratio). This will help you to find your best and poorest performers, which will be helpful when you start to implement changes.
This data will help you to see where your greatest challenges lie - and what should be tackled first.
When initially assessing your fleet, there will be three general areas of focus:
CO2 emissions
Fuel and energy usage
Fleet composition
3. Set your targets
If you can benchmark your own fleet’s current sustainability performance against other fleets of a similar profile, this can help you to set realistic targets.
You may have some hard emissions reporting and reductions targets to meet to remain compliant or to conform with a customer’s sustainability requirements. At the same time, you might want to create some stretch goals that will require more time, effort and resources to meet.
Here are some examples:
Fully electrify the fleet by 2035, to comply with Government legislation
Reduce CO2 emissions by 30% over the next five years to meet company sustainability targets
Lower net annual fuel consumption by 5% over the next three years to reduce operational costs
Regardless of the specifics of the target, it’s important that everyone on the team clearly understands the objectives and the timeframes involved.
4. Focus on your core challenges first
It’s easy when you have access to lots of data, to try to fix everything, all at once. Sorry to say, but you can’t.
Instead, it’s best to start out by focusing on one or two core operational areas where your data shows that your fleet is underperforming, or where your operations team has flagged an issue.
For example, the idling reports may show some serious idling time violations, your managers may have flagged that your drivers have been picking up more points recently for speeding violations, or you may be concerned that fuel consumption is rising, despite no great increase in business volume.
Make these your first areas of attention…
5. Make one change at a time
Rather like trying to fix everything all at once, try to ignore your desire to change five things at the same time. While it might make results come a little faster, you’ll have a hard time seeing which one drove the most value, which means you’ll have to keep doing all of them, even if only two were genuinely useful.
In the long run, this will make the improvements harder to sustain, especially when you start trying to fix other problems. You’ll find that you and your team can become inundated with “optimisations” that end up dragging you down.
Instead, think like a scientist and change one variable, while keeping all others constant. Then measure the results - did that improve your sustainability KPIs?
The role of electrification
Many fleets think “sustainable” and leap straight to electrification - and for a good reason. EVs can drastically reduce your fleet’s scope 1 carbon emissions by eliminating exhaust emissions.
However, they will generate a better ROI and work better if you spend the time to improve vehicle utilisation and eco-driver performance, reduce excessive payloads, and optimise route planning first.
Take the first step on the path to a greener fleet
The path to a sustainable fleet is different for everyone. The key is to take the time to map it out clearly before you begin, engage your team to help you on the journey, and track your progress. Short-term, low cost actions will help to create a feeling of momentum, and they’ll lay the foundations upon which long-term actions can be safely made.
Need help getting started?
If you’re unsure where to start, we can help. Green Steps has helped numerous fleets across the UK to decarbonise their operations, while also becoming safer and more productive. We look forward to getting to know you and your fleet.
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