Fleet right-sizing is an important, ongoing exercise for organizations with fleets. With too many assets, a company risks losing money from underuse. But with too few assets or the wrong mix of them, a company may not be able to deliver on commitments.
A data-based fleet right-sizing process ensures that the number and type of assets an organization has invested in are the best fit to meet the company’s needs.
What is fleet right-sizing and why do it?
Fleet right-sizing is defined as the ongoing process of reviewing fleet size and vehicle mix to ensure organizations have the right number and type of vehicles for their current operational needs.
Doing a fleet right-sizing exercise helps leaders make data-driven decisions to maximize revenue potential. Leaders should understand if all the assets they have are being used. If not, they can get rid of idle equipment that costs money but doesn’t generate revenue.
Best practices for fleet right-sizing
To do a fleet right-sizing exercise without missing important data, follow these five best practices:
- Establish consistent tracking across fleet vehicles, assets, and equipment
- Monitor utilization analytics (how frequently assets are used)
- Explore usage analytics (how assets are used in operation)
- Diagnose the problem
- Execute a fleet right‑sizing plan
1. Establish consistent tracking across fleet vehicles, assets, and equipment
How should a leader accurately right-size their fleet without missing anything? They should start with the most important step, which is to gather accurate data. Data helps confirm or deny gut feelings about fleet size and usage.
Get the data for a fleet right-sizing exercise by establishing reliable tracking for every asset. Make sure every vehicle, trailer, and piece of equipment is being tracked and feeding data back into a single platform. For example, if you use Motive GPS fleet tracking and asset tracking, the hardware sends tracking data back to a centralized platform. Everything lives in one place, ready for analysis.
Motive gathers data about live and historical location, engine hours, and movement for every asset in your operation. It automatically pairs vehicles, assets, and drivers, so you always know which trailer or piece of equipment is with which truck, and where they’ve been over time.
2. Monitor utilization analytics
Utilization says how much each asset in the fleet is used, providing a big-picture view that helps leaders right size their fleets. Over time, utilization analytics indicate if an asset is being used enough to justify owning, maintaining, and insuring it.
With Motive, leaders can view utilization insights such as:
- Dormancy. How long an asset has been sitting without moving.
- Active vs. available time. How much an asset is in use vs. simply available.
- Mileage and engine hours. The number of miles an asset has driven and total hours the engine has been running.
These data points make it easy to see which units are consistently underused and inactive.
Leaders can also pair utilization with downtime metrics (how long assets are marked out of service for maintenance or repair) to distinguish true excess capacity from assets that look underutilized because they’re in the shop.
Agmark used data to right-size chassis count
Agmark, a bulk liquids carrier, faced a chassis shortage during the pandemic. New chassis were backordered for months, but Agmark still needed to keep goods moving. They deployed Motive Asset Gateways to find out exactly where existing chassis were and how long they sat idle.
With that data, the team realized they actually had multiple chassis that hadn’t moved in 180 days. They were able to reallocate as many as they needed, and ultimately reduced the size of their chassis fleet by 11%.
We’ve been able to decrease the size of our fleet and still operate effectively, because we’re able to get better visibility of the chassis that are sitting for a long time and utilize them so much better.
Agmark is a good example of data‑driven right‑sizing. With the right data, you can discover underuse, then redirect assets while improving capacity.
3. Explore usage analytics
Unlike utilization data, which indicate when an asset is being used, usage analytics explain how an asset is being used during that time. For example, utilization might show that a truck was active for eight hours, while usage analytics reveal that three of those hours were spent idling. Usage analytics, like idling time and dwell time, can help leaders uncover the reasons for low utilization. It might be excess capacity, but it might also be a symptom of a maintenance, routing, or jobsite problem.
Usage analytics belong in a fleet right-sizing exercise because they help leaders improve the efficiency of the assets they decide to keep.
With Motive, leaders can review usage analytics such as:
- Idling time. Engine on and not moving, split into productive vs. unproductive idling.
- Dwell time. How long assets sit at specific yards, jobsites, or customer locations between arrival and departure (Motive defines this as time spent inside a geofence).
4. Diagnose the problem
Once leaders have both utilization and usage analytics in a central platform, they can decide whether to redeploy or cut assets, or fix operational bottlenecks first.
For example, if an asset has low utilization paired with high dwell time, it could mean that the real issue is operational — a loading or unloading delay, a jobsite inefficiency, or dispatch problem.
Leaders should use utilization as a primary focus for right-sizing, but then add usage metrics to explain and validate high or low utilization. This way, you’re recommending fleet right-sizing moves that won’t accidentally create capacity gaps or new service problems.
Motive Analytics makes it easy for anyone to turn fleet data into clear findings. Embedded directly in the Motive Dashboard, it brings data together into one integrated operations platform. Then users can use AI answers to ask questions in plain English and receive answers that are easy to understand.
JMS Transportation improved utilization by 30%
For JMS Transportation, Motive’s impact on utilization shows up most clearly in their trailer fleet. The Iowa‑based carrier owns more than 100 power units but roughly 800 trailers, and they were struggling to track them.
They deployed Motive Asset Gateways across the trailers, and can now see exactly where each trailer is and for how long it has been sitting. Safety Director Heather Walerius explained, “We’re able to track our trailers and get an accurate report when they’re sitting somewhere too long.” She estimates that by putting this data to use, their trailer utilization has improved by at least 30%.
5. Execute a fleet right‑sizing plan
Once data is gathered and analyzed, leaders can implement a plan for right-sizing a fleet. A good fleet right-sizing plan has three steps:
- Design the plan. Decide where to redeploy, retire, or avoid replacing assets, and where you need to keep or add capacity.
- Pilot where possible. Test changes in one region or asset class first, and make sure service levels and driver experience hold up.
- Monitor and adjust. Use the same utilization and usage metrics in Motive Analytics to validate that the new fleet mix is working or to catch signs you’ve cut the fleet by too much.
Right-sizing your fleet is easier with Motive
It’s much easier to right-size your fleet and maximize revenue when hardware, data, and powerful analytics tools are centralized in one platform. The Motive Integrated Operations Platform unifies fleet management, equipment monitoring, and analytics so you’re not piecing together data from multiple systems.
Confidently right-size your fleet with the data and tools you need in Motive. Watch a demo to learn more.
