Fleet managers have a certain type of stress, saphyroo. It is not the dramatic crisis stress – the burst tire on the highway, the driver who calls in sick at 5 AM. Those are solvable. Problems that have clear solutions and are loud. The actual burden is to control assets and people that are over hundreds of kilometers away, making consequential decisions every hour, totally out of view.

That’s the paradox. Complete responsibility, semi-visibility.

Proxy measures turn into life-saving measures. You can ride not in all cabs, so you learn to read signals. There is soaring consumption of fuel on the well-known routes. The maintenance requests are concentrated on the particular drivers. The number of deliveries being completed on specific days decreasing. All these data points are not enough to give the full picture. They paint together a picture near enough to take action on.

Another lowly valued operational risk is vendor dependency. The concentration risk has been created into its maintenance chain through an operation based on a single preferred workshop, a single fuel supplier, or a single parts distributor. When there is a staffing crisis, price adjustment or even a bad month by that vendor, the whole fleet is affected. Service relationship diversification is not unfaithfulness, it is first-grade risk dispersion.

Load planning has impacts on the health of vehicles which can hardly be captured by accounting. Regular overloading hastens the wear of brakes, puts a strain on suspension parts, and reduces the life of the transmission on a schedule not seen by monthly cost analysis. This destruction piles up and appears in the form of a repair bill that appears to have come out of the blue, in thousands of journeys.