Fleet Efficiency Assessment
A vehicle rostered for fifty hours a week rarely spends fifty hours earning. This assessment splits the scheduled week into moving, idling, waiting and workshop time, sets it against how much of your distance carried freight, and surfaces the hours nobody can account for.
Your numbers
Assess one duty type at a time. Mixing distribution vans with tippers produces an average that describes neither.
Hours the vehicle is rostered to be available, not hours it was actually used.
Engine on and wheels turning. Take this from telematics if you have it, not from the driver's sheet.
Engine on, vehicle stationary. Includes cab heating and cooling, which is idling whether or not you approve of it.
Engine off at a customer, a gate or a loading bay. Detention time belongs here.
Scheduled hours lost to service, repair or inspection. Average across the year rather than picking a quiet week.
Distance driven with revenue freight aboard. Repositioning and the run home are not loaded.
Result
Fleet efficiency score
39.8 %
Moving time share multiplied by loaded distance share. Both have to be good.
- Moving time share
- 54.0 %
- Idle share of engine-on time
- 18.2 %
- Loaded distance share
- 73.8 %
- Unexplained hours
- 5.0 hours/vehicle/week
- Non-moving fleet hours
- 920 hours/week
The formula
- Engine-on hours = Moving hours + Idling hours
- Moving time share = (Moving hours ÷ Scheduled hours) × 100, clamped to 0-100
- Idle share of engine-on time = (Idling hours ÷ Engine-on hours) × 100
- Loaded distance share = (Loaded distance ÷ Distance driven) × 100, clamped to 0-100
- Fleet efficiency score = (Moving time share × Loaded distance share) ÷ 100
- Accounted hours = Moving + Idling + Waiting + Workshop hours
- Unexplained hours = Scheduled hours − Accounted hours, floored at 0
- Non-moving fleet hours per week = (Scheduled hours − Moving hours, floored at 0) × Vehicles
Assumptions and limits
- The efficiency score multiplies two ratios, so a weakness in either drags it down. A vehicle that moves constantly while empty and one that runs loaded but sits all week can score identically. Read the two components, not just the headline.
- Loaded distance is treated as productive and empty distance as waste. On a collection round, backhaul and repositioning are unavoidable, so the figure describes your network shape rather than your planners.
- Idling is neither costed nor judged here. Some of it is legally required rest with the cab conditioned, and some of it is a PTO doing paid work. This tool counts hours; deciding which hours were wrong is your job.
- Nothing is weighted by vehicle value or revenue. An idle hour on your most expensive asset counts the same as an idle hour on a pool van.
- If accounted hours exceed the roster, unexplained hours read zero and the roster is the thing that is wrong. Scheduled hours are the input fleets most often supply from the plan rather than from reality.
- The model cannot tell whether unexplained hours are waste or simply unrecorded. That distinction needs the source data, and finding it is usually the point of running this.
The gap between rostered and earning
Ask a transport manager how hard a vehicle works and the answer arrives in scheduled hours, because that is the number the roster prints. It is also the number least connected to what the vehicle did. Fifty rostered hours can contain twenty-seven moving, six idling at a fence, seven behind a locked gate, five on a ramp, and five that nobody can explain to you.
Those last five are the ones worth chasing. They are not a loss in themselves. They are evidence that the record and the day have drifted apart, and every efficiency conversation after that will be argued rather than settled.
Why moving time and loaded distance multiply
The two halves of efficiency fail independently. Time efficiency asks whether the asset was in use. Distance efficiency asks whether the use was worth anything. A fleet can be excellent at one and hopeless at the other, and reporting only the average lets it hide.
Multiplying them is deliberately unforgiving. Eighty percent moving time against sixty percent loaded distance gives forty-eight, and that is the honest reading: slightly under half of the rostered week produced revenue movement. An average of the two would have said seventy, which describes a fleet that does not exist.
Waiting time is somebody else's decision
Waiting hours sit apart from the rest because you frequently cannot fix them from inside your own operation. A vehicle held at a receiving bay is losing your money on someone else's site, under a booking process you did not design.
Measuring it is still worth the effort, and not for internal reasons. Seven hours a week per vehicle, attributed by customer and by site, is the only thing that turns a detention conversation from a complaint into a commercial position. Fleets that cannot produce that number absorb the cost quietly and call it the cost of doing business.
Frequently asked questions
There is no universal figure, and any tool that hands you one is selling something. A long-haul operation and an urban service fleet have structurally different limits, because the service fleet spends its day at customer premises by design. Use this score against your own history: same fleet, same duty type, quarter over quarter. A score that moves is information. A score compared to a stranger's is not.
No, and doing so is a common double-count. Moving hours here mean wheels turning; idling means engine on and stationary. They do not overlap, and together they make up engine-on time. If your telematics reports a single engine-on figure without splitting it, this assessment will not work properly until you can separate the two.
Because nobody would enter them honestly if asked directly. Unexplained hours are what is left after you account for the week, and the remainder is usually larger than expected. That surprise is the useful part. It typically points at short jobs never logged, a depot shunt nobody records, or a roster that stopped matching reality some months ago.
No. You can raise the score by pushing vehicles harder and pay for it later in maintenance and driver turnover. Efficiency measures how much of the asset you used, not whether using it that way was wise. Read it next to your cost per kilometre and your workshop load rather than on its own.
You can, and the result will be arithmetic rather than insight. Duty types have different structural limits, so a blended score mostly reports your fleet mix back to you. Run it per duty type — trunking, distribution, service — and compare each against its own previous quarter.
Stop estimating. Measure it.
Fleet Efficiency Assessment gives you the arithmetic. Fleet Analytics Software gives you the live numbers from your own fleet.