Transport & Fleet Benchmarking to Reduce Fuel, Tyre, Maintenance and Operating Costs
How efficiently is your fleet operating? To find out how transport/fleet benchmarking can help you reduce supply chain costs, talk to a transport benchmarking consultant today.
Where You’ve Seen Us
How We Can Help
Why Transport & Fleet Benchmarking?
The BMS Transport and Fleet Benchmarking service compares your fleet’s operating costs and service performance against other transport operators running similar vehicle types. Not averages pulled from a trade association report — actual comparable operations, measured the same way yours is. What that means in practice is that you get an honest, external view of how efficiently your fleet is operating. Whether costs are where they should be, where the performance gaps are, and what best-in-class actually looks like for an operation like yours.
Common Questions about Fleet Transport Benchmarking
How do you compare fleets fairly when every operation is different?
We benchmark by vehicle type, so a rigid truck is compared against other rigid trucks, a B-double against other B-doubles. The comparison is always like-for-like, not averaged across an entire fleet.
Our routes are quite specific, can you still benchmark us meaningfully?
Yes. Route characteristics, freight type and operating environment are all factored into how we group comparable operations. The database is large enough that we can almost always find a genuinely comparable peer group.
We lease rather than own our vehicles. Does that change anything?
Not significantly. Whether you own or lease, the operating cost structure is similar enough that the benchmarking is still valid. We just adjust how we account for the capital cost component.
What do we actually do with the results?
That depends on what we find. Some clients use the results to renegotiate maintenance contracts. Others identify specific operational changes that reduce fuel consumption or improve utilisation. Either way, you’re making decisions based on data rather than assumption.
How often should we benchmark our fleet?
Once every two years is a reasonable starting point. Fleet costs shift gradually enough that annual benchmarking isn’t always necessary, but leaving it longer than two years means you’re probably flying blind on a significant cost line.
The Process
The BMS Transport & Fleet Benchmarking Process
Most transport manager know their costs are high. The problem isn’t awareness, it’s that without hard data to compare against, it’s nearly impossible to know whether you have a genuine efficiency problem or whether you’re just operating in a high-cost environment that everyone in your sector deals with. That distinction matters, because the response to each is completely different.
What You'll Get
A vehicle-by-vehicle cost comparison
We compare your operating costs against other operators running equivalent vehicle types like fuel, tyres, maintenance, and other variable costs, broken down properly rather than lumped together. Most clients find the line-by-line comparison more useful than they expected.
A service performance assessment
Cost is only half the picture. We also measure how your fleet is performing on service like utilisation rates, on-time delivery, and consistency, and then tell you where you sit relative to best practice.
A clear picture of the performance gaps
We put a dollar figure on what the gaps between your current performance and best-in-class are actually worth. When you can see that a specific change in fuel management or maintenance scheduling is worth a particular amount per year, the decision about whether to act on it becomes fairly straightforward.
A prioritised view of where to focus
Not a list of everything that could theoretically be better. The highest-impact changes, in order, with a realistic view of what improvement looks like for an operation of your size and type.