By Darren Parker, vertical market product manager – transport, Navman Wireless.
Fleet managers are under scrutiny as never before. They are responsible for the third-biggest cost line in the business, right behind wages and rent. And, while controlling costs is of prime importance, it’s just the tip of the responsibility iceberg. Sitting below the waterline, out of sight, is a mass of inter-related accountabilities, for fleet managers also have a role to play in ensuring operational efficiency, improving service delivery, managing employee safety and protecting corporate reputation.
How so? A fleet manager’s job is to optimise the way the business allocates transport resources, manage vehicle servicing and monitor associated productivity. More trips in less time generally means greater productivity and less expense. And because fleet vehicles are used to sell to or service customers, recording better information on their location and use helps to set and meet realistic expectations and improve customer communications.
They’re also responsible for managing how vehicles are used. A branded vehicle, well-maintained and safely driven, is a highly visible mobile billboard. Poorly maintained and dangerously driven, it represents a threat to reputation. And, once the new health and safety legislation comes into effect, the way company vehicles are driven will also become a legal liability.
What keeps fleet managers awake at night is not just how to achieve optimal utilisation of expensive equipment, increase productivity, trim fuel usage, ensure that people drive safely and obey speed limits, but how to do all this when the things you’re responsible are out of your sight, out of your immediate control and travelling at 100km/h – or more.
The solution, as is so often the case, is in the detail. And the detail is masses of data, in this case telematics, or fleet tracking data – second-by-second vehicle location data captured and made easier to understand.
A high quality GPS fleet tracking solution registers moment-by-moment changes in vehicle location and engine performance. It can not only tell you where each vehicle is at any given time, it will tell you how fast it’s going, whether it’s braking harshly, or whether the engine has been idling excessively.
You can configure it to alert you to exceptions such as speeding, excessive idling, or trips out-of-territory. Accurate fleet utilisation data lets you get more work out of your vehicles and machines. With system reports generated from reliable data, you have full visibility into which parts of your fleet are unused and underused.
Trimming fuel consumption across the fleet is based on the approach of gathering and reporting this data, and presenting reports to enable fleet operators a top-to-bottom view of the business. The system can help detect fuel theft and fuel-related equipment problems, and eliminate unnecessary refuelling trips.
Advanced telematics systems use geo-fencing to offer site-based fleet utilisation reporting. These systems can automatically break down your fleet use by site as vehicles move from depot to various delivery points then return.
You can review different route options and see what changes improve the efficiency of your daisy chain. Real time data from telematics can show exactly how much it costs to service customers or deliver goods. You can use telematics to show which vehicles are the most economical for particular tasks.
It’s not just about capturing the data. For enterprise-size organisations, combining a GPS fleet management system with a business intelligence system helps organisations to measure and manage fleet expenditure, leverage their own data for decision making based on key performance indicators, and provide insights into future trends.
To work with this vast mountain of data and understand and make sense of it and use it to improve business and sharpen your competitive edge you need visual dashboards and business intelligence analytics.
A dashboard transforms the way fleet managers process complex information to make decisions by displaying real time data clearly and effectively through easy-to-read charts or graphs designed to do just one job, like monitoring all drivers in a fleet for instances of over speeding or the amount of time an engine has been idling.
The human eye can identify critical patterns more easily when information is presented as a chart rather than as rows of numbers. A fleet manager can monitor an entire fleet from a single dashboard as it allows them to focus on key trends, comparisons and exceptions, helping them to make effective operational decisions in situations that may change minute-by-minute.
If you can analyse current trends you can predict future trends and look to adapt employees’ behaviour accordingly, improving performance and safety.
It all adds up to getting the best possible – and safest – result for the least possible cost.
For more about Navman Wireless, www.navmanwireless.co.nz
