VEHICLE FLEET MANAGEMENT PRACTICES: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

The purpose of this paper reviews the influence of Vehicle Fleet Management Practices, (VFMP). A systematic review of papers was performed analysing 56 articles from year 2014 to 2021. Vehicle Fleet Management Practices research has garnered interest from both academics and industrialists in both the public and private sector. This is demonstrated by the increasing number of academic papers published in recent years. The article discusses interesting findings, suggests and lays down a number of directions for future research. In addition, limitations of this work are presented. The conclusion of this study provides sufficient evidence on the need for further research addressing the interaction between vehicle fleet management practices and service delivery in public entities.


ISSN: 2320-5407
Int. J. Adv. Res. 9 (10), 1287-1291 1288 Driver management involves driver recruitment, driver education and recognition (Begashaw, 2018;Ampiah, 2018;Aflabo et al, 2020). Osborne and Hammoud (2017) noted that driving training programs allow drivers to directly upgrade their knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes and professionalism which they require to meet the needs of customers, and respond better to customers" requirements. Ludbrook,Meehan and Mason (2016) state that good planning prevents the organization from losing money, as it would ensure that only the right vehicles are procured in the right amount and at the right time. On the other hand, Meehan, Ludbrook and Mason (2016) noted that a vehicle replacement policy that endeavours to anticipate future needs of the customer also endears customers and leads to customer satisfaction. By the same token, Sahling and Kayser (2016) observed that vehicle procurement planning enables the company to anticipate the future and hence procure vehicles that would lead to customer satisfaction. The preceding thoughts are highlighting that poor planning is not an option as that affects the specifications regarding vehicle models which addresses good matching of vehicles" tasks to manage fuel consumption,

Research Method:-
This paper seeks to provide a rigorous, critical analysis of the state-of-the-art research into the effect of vehicle fleet management practices. The articles selected for inclusion in this review were restricted to English-language studies only. Academic peer-reviewed articles, articles from the "grey literature" were also included. The researcher conducted the search for peer-reviewed articles indexed in Elsevier, ScienceDirect and Journal Storage (JSTOR) databases published between 2014 and 2021. Those articles with a broader focus on vehicle fleet management were only considered. The keywords used for the selection of articles are: "Vehicle Fleet Management", "Vehicle Maintenance", "Fuel Management", "Vehicle Replacement" and "Driver Management" The papers selected for the analysis based were characterized as to their research methods, such as systematic literature reviews, and papers employing empirical approaches based on surveys, case studies and interviews (Carter & Easton, 2011). To ensure reliability, all the authors were involved in searching and selecting papers independently. After searching and selecting papers, the authors compared notes and reached agreement on the selection and all the coding of papers. Based on this approach, 56 papers were finally identified and subsequently analysed.

Results:-
The results comprise of descriptive analysis of the 56 articles. The descriptive analysis consists in identifying and classifying the articles by sectorial framework and analysis of research variables. Table 1 shows the sectorial framework of articles used to analyse the vehicle fleet management practices.

Research Gaps
The literature review has opened a few future research directions. A plethora of studies have identified vehicle fleet management as one of the variables of asset management, thus vehicle fleet management has not been fully exhausted in most research studies, therefore, presenting a gap in the vehicle fleet management practices study. There has been inadequate attention to and discussion on vehicle fleet management practices in either the retail or public sector. Nonetheless, a great amount of literature-based evidence on the research topic is abundant in transport, manufacturing and humanitarian aid sectors, thus creating sectorial and contextual research gaps which needs to be filled.

Limitations and Future research directions
The restriction of database access availability has limited this review; hence articles from other sources of primary importance on the vehicle fleet management practices could have been excluded from processing. The keywords used may not be all inclusive. The review was carried out on 56 articles; therefore, the exploration of more articles could broaden the conceptualization and knowledge of empirical research, and issues currently addressed regarding vehicle management practices. Public entities remain under pressure to achieve financial savings through efficient and coordinated service delivery, thus vehicle fleet management practices such as vehicle replacement, maintenance, fuel management and driver management among other may help provide superior service level. Therefore, it is important to examine the influence of vehicle fleet management practices on service delivery in either the retail or public sector organizations.

Conclusions:-
In this paper, we have carried out a comprehensive literature review on vehicle fleet management practices. This study attempted to enrich the knowledge of the research field by carrying out a literature review of articles available on specific databases in the eight years. We find that the research on vehicle fleet management is growing fast in terms of number of articles published and the variety of the journals in which this topic is discussed. This study contributes to the fleet management research by presenting a comprehensive list of vehicle fleet management practices and proposing a number of critical future research directions in this research area. Further research can be conducted on the influence of vehicle fleet management practices on service delivery in either the retail or public sectors cognisant the fact that majority of these studies mentioned in this article above mostly explored the impact of vehicle fleet management practices on disaster and relief responses, and overall humanitarian logistics perspective, (Begashaw;.