As fleet solution software has advanced, fleet managers can now take advantage of immense quantities of vehicle data to improve operational performance end-to-end. Vehicle information including fuel use, vehicle maintenance warnings, GPS tracking, and speed are available and easily accessible via today’s telematics solutions. Dashboards and mobile applications have become more common and as a result, fleet departments within a variety of industries have moved to digitally-driven approaches to manage fleets and ideally improve fleet performance.
With a multitude of fleet telematics vendors to choose from, it is imperative for fleet managers to intelligently assess their options and needs in order to truly improve the performance of their fleet. The first step is to understand the areas telematics can improve.
Today’s Telematics – Insights Followed by Action
With access to real-time driver activity and location, fleet managers are now able to proactively optimize vehicle logistics. Insights on fuel usage can also be accessed and evaluated to ensure fuel costs are in line with expectations and possibly reduce future costs by mitigating any unfavorable trends. In addition to fuel use and fleet productivity, telematics insights can also help manage areas related to fleet safety.
Fleet Telematics Areas of Focus
1. Fleet Operations: Reduce miles traveled and increase MPGs. Reduce time for mileage reporting and receive preventative maintenance alerts relating to recalls.
2. Fleet Safety: Minimize or mitigate unsafe driving, including harsh acceleration, harsh braking, harsh cornering, speeding and improper routing for the vehicle.
3. Fleet Sustainability: Extending the life of vehicles through proper and proactive maintenance, as well as monitoring and reducing emissions.
Today’s telematics solutions streamline the collection and analysis of data that help fleet managers generate insights and improvements in their fleets. The downfall of these traditional telematics solutions is that they require a high level of action to be taken post data-capture.
This obvious caveat can prevent fleet managers from experiencing critical and cost-savings operational improvements and is a practical reason for fleet manager to consider alternative technologies.
Beyond Telematics and the Advancement of Fleet Management
By utilizing existing and advanced telematics technology, new fleet management solutions have developed to solve the limitations of traditional telematics. What once required analysis and then action to receive results, can now happen automatically with enhanced fleet management solutions. In addition to tracking performance and providing outputs of data, fleets can now experience instantaneous vehicle optimizations to improve performance without management intervention.
Improvements to fleet productivity, safety and vehicle performance can now be done efficiently and effectively with enhanced management solutions. Capable of helping with day-to-day operations management and prevent future misfortunes from occurring.
Capabilities of enhanced fleet management solutions include:
· Optimized idle RPM profiles: reduce the idle RPM for specific fleet use cases – to reduce fuel consumption without compromising performance
· Manager-defined idle shutoff: after a specified period of time, the vehicle automatically shuts off to conserve gas and reduce emissions.
· Seatbelt-dependent start: the vehicle’s ignition won’t start until the driver’s seatbelt is fastened to reduce accident costs
· Driver-vehicle pairing: drivers pair themselves to the vehicle through their smartphones and the connected vehicle interface to manage shift time and off-hours use
· Distracted driving prevention: the driver’s phone is restricted to only manager-permitted apps, like routing to minimize and possibly eliminate distracted
With enhanced fleet management solutions fleet managers can positively impact operating costs, prevent vehicle accidents associated with driver behavior and increase the lifecycle of the fleet vehicle. These benefits not only provide fleet managers with something more to consider within the fleet management solution market but are leading the way to safer and more sustainable fleet operations.
To learn more about enhanced fleet management solutions, visit: derivesystems.com/enterprise/overview/
This article was sponsored by Derive Systems; a leading automotive technology company with over two million software installations on the road today. Derive connects vehicles and their engines to the digital world, enabling individuals and fleets to customize and optimize their vehicles for performance, fuel efficiency and safety.
