Everywhere you look there’s articles about “Improving fleet efficiency”, “How to be more fuel efficient”, “Making efficiency a priority”, “Complete more jobs more efficiently”. But what does efficiency actually mean? And what does that mean for your day-to-day work?
Without needing to get out the dictionary, efficiency is just doing more with less. That can be doing more deliveries in less time, driving more kilometres while using less petrol, completing more site visits with less complaints, or organising all your stops in minutes instead of hours.
Helping your business become more efficient means you save costs and save time.
What Is “Optimal Efficiency”?
A common misconception with efficiency is that less is better. That kind of thinking doesn’t always hold true. For example, if you spend 10 litres of petrol completing 15 deliveries it would be far more efficient to just use bicycles to complete deliveries instead of trucks. Then you don’t have to pay for any fuel. However your delivery times would increase and you’d pay way more for labour than what you ever would on petrol.
Optimal efficiency is finding the sweet spot where you get all the jobs done, without wasting too much fuel or time. The optimal efficiency for the example before might be reordering your deliveries so they complete the 15 jobs with only 8 litres of fuel, and in 20 minutes less than the original route.
What’s The Difference Between “Effective” And “Efficient”?
Effective and efficient are said together so often that it’s hard to know the difference. An effective job would be completing 8 hours worth of work in 8 hours. The jobs are all completed and done well.
Whereas efficient, as we said before, is all about doing more with less. This means completing 8 hours worth of work in 6 hours, while maintaining the same level of quality. If the quality drops off, the work isn’t more efficient, it’s just faster and means you might have to fix mistakes later.
Getting your team to work effectively and efficiently means getting the most out of your resources. You can do this by making sure the right people are on the right jobs, the routes they’re travelling are quick, admin processes flow easily and everything works together to give customers the best possible experience.
Doing all these things helps to increase productivity. If you increase the productivity of your team then you’re saving time, getting more work done and allowing time for extra work to get completed. It’s a simple equation:
Increasing Productivity + Effectiveness = More Efficient
An effective and efficient team can fit more work in each day without hiring new staff or too many extra costs. This helps your business grow and be more profitable.
Making Efficiency Easy
Finally, efficiency doesn’t have to be hard. Efficiency can be easy if you have the right tools in place to help your business find areas where you can get more done with less.
Planning faster routes shouldn’t take the extra time that would’ve been spent on the road, completing more jobs shouldn’t mean an 8 hour day becomes 10 hours, and using less fuel shouldn’t come at the cost of fast delivery times.
Locate2u helps businesses just like yours do more with less every day. Book a demo to talk to someone about how you can take advantage of Locate2u today.
