Can Telematics Solve Fleet Performance Challenges?
With telematics, fleet managers and fleet drivers can take advantage of immense quantities of vehicle data in order to improve the performance of their fleets end-to-end. Everything from fuel use, vehicle maintenance warnings, GPS tracking, and speed are available and easily accessible. The accessibility of these metrics can provide management with insights into where opportunity for performance improvement exists. A possible win for overcoming some of the tough challenges fleet managers face today.
Before investing and implementing any software solution, it is important to understand what is to be solved with the solution itself. A performance challenge within a fleet can undoubtedly be addressed, resolved and potentially mitigated in the future with the right solution. The step to experiencing such result is knowing the areas of difficulty well enough to evaluate a solution against them. From operations to profit, knowing what fleet performance challenges exist is key to experiencing improvement.
Telematics of Today – A Solve to Fleet Management Challenges?
Utilizing data to directly improve the bottom line is not a new approach in today’s digital world. Though each fleet has metrics and data specific to their industry or fleet size, there are areas that almost all fleet managers focus on from a performance point of view. Fleet productivity, fuel efficiency, fleet safety and sustainability are areas of focus that are important to fleet managers regardless of industry or size of the fleet. With telematics, fleet managers have established high hopes to solve some of their biggest challenges in these areas.
Challenges Fleet Managers Are Looking for Telematics to Solve:
- Safety: Minimizing or better, eliminating, unsafe driving, including harsh acceleration, harsh braking, harsh cornering, speeding, and improper routing of the vehicle.
- Savings: Reduce overall costs associated with fleet fuel consumption.
- Sustainability: Extend the life of the vehicle through proper and proactive maintenance. Improve fuel use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- Productivity: Optimize routing to reduce miles traveled to a job site, increase MPGs and number of jobs completed to positively impact profitability.
Real-time driver activity and location, enable fleet managers to fill in informational gaps and apply those findings to shift driver behavior. 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. Where traditional telematics fall short, enhanced fleet management solutions solve with proactive and tested engine customization software.
Telematics Reimagined: Beyond Data to Action
Enhanced fleet management solutions go beyond traditional telematics to solve some of the toughest challenges fleet managers face related to productivity, safety and vehicle performance. By shifting responsibility from human factors such as driver behavior to the vehicle, enhanced fleet management solutions deliver improvements to the day-to-day operations management, overall operating costs and can even help prevent future misfortunes from occurring. Improving safety compliance and reducing risk of driver injury can now be achieved proactively. Reducing fleet fuel use which results in lessened greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved more easily. These capabilities combined with additional benefits of enhanced fleet management solutions are important for fleet industry professionals to be cognizant of.
Capabilities of enhanced fleet management solution 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 when in park, the vehicle automatically shuts off to conserve gas and reduce emissions. Can also be set based on specific weather conditions.
- 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 driving.
With a solve to the known limitations of traditional telematics, fleet managers can improve operating costs, prevent accidents associated with driver behavior and increase fleet productivity efficiently and effectively. What once required analysis and then action to receive results, can now happen automatically. No longer is the responsibility for fleet performance improvement solely on the driver alone. By optimizing the vehicle, desired outcomes are far more attainable. 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.
About Derive Systems
Derive is an automotive technology company that empowers fleet managers to optimize their fleet’s performance beyond traditional telematics and driver training. Derive’s solution customizes fleets to be more fuel efficient, safer, and sustainable by using software that upgrades vehicle operating systems. With over 2 million software installations, Derive has transformed fleet performance from one-size-fits-all to mission-specific.
