Modern businesses don’t have too little data; they have too much. Typically, information about vehicles, drivers, routes, fuel usage, and maintenance schedules is disorganized and widely distributed. Telematics hardware acts as the connecting force between these moving components gathers data from vehicles and sends it to the fleet management platform. This turns raw data into actionable business insights.
This information helps managers better understand fleet usage and identify opportunities for improvement. Businesses can use one system to track essential fleet activities instead of relying on other records or assumptions to spot patterns, address problems, and make informed fleet operations decisions.
Take the Raw Data and Turn It into Useful Information
A telematics device is a communication link between a vehicle and those who control it. It can gather GPS data, speed, acceleration, braking, mileage, fuel usage, engine data, and other operational data. Accelerometers measure changes in movement, and GPS receivers provide information such as location and route. Diagnostic and performance data can be added through connections to the vehicle’s onboard systems.
The value lies in what takes place after harvesting. Telematics Software provides managers with thousands of individual data points, but it groups all this information into dashboards, reports, alerts and trends. This provides a better understanding of what is happening in a fleet and what to do next.
Improving Fleet Efficiency
Telematics’ clear business value is improved fleet utilization. The manager can view vehicle locations, total travel/idle time, and frequency of use. This can identify any underutilized vehicles, inefficient routes, unnecessary journeys, or scheduling issues.
These insights can improve day-to-day planning for businesses managing deliveries, field services, construction vehicles, and company vehicles. Routes may be varied based on actual travel requirements and vehicle assignments may be correlated to workloads. Increased utilization can help minimize excess miles driven and support sound investments and fleet sizing decisions.
Controlling Fuel and Operating Costs
Fuel may be a substantial operation cost, especially for larger fleets. Telematics hardware helps companies understand how vehicles use fuel and which behaviors lead to fuel waste.
Idle time, hard starts/stopping, speeding and sub-optimal routing can raise operating costs. Once managers identify these issues, driver coaching, route planning, and/or operational changes can solve them. According to Radius, telematics helps vehicles save fuel and reduce operating expenses by tracking idling and alerting businesses to it.
Supporting Preventive Maintenance
Vehicle downtime can cause delays, upset customers, and cost money. By leveraging telematics data, businesses can shift from reactive maintenance to more proactive, effective planning.
Vehicle diagnostics can provide information on fault codes, engine parameters, mileage, and more that reveals vehicle health. This information can be used with service schedules to determine which vehicles in the fleet may need service. It is easier to handle a maintenance problem than a failure when a customer delivers.
How to Make Driver Safety Measurable
Another way telematics supports driver safety is by turning behavior into information. These devices can monitor driving behavior, including hard braking, quick acceleration, speeding and turning. Rather than just making ‘spot checks’ from time to time, fleet managers can start to look for consistent driving behaviors and use them as a basis for training.
This can foster an increased safety culture. Managers provide feedback to drivers on measurable events and recognize improvements over time. Combined with vehicle cameras, telematics can provide more context for incidents and help businesses investigate what occurred.
Strengthening Customer Service
Telematics data shouldn’t be limited to the fleet department. It also improves the customer experience. Businesses can send more accurate ETAs, track attendance at customer locations with real-time location data, and quickly alert customers to changes.
Knowing the location of service vehicles can help schedule service companies. With live location and trip info, customers can have greater visibility for delivery operations. These enhancements build customer confidence.
Smarter decision-making with Alerts
Actionable telematics isn’t just about gathering information. This is the concept of “showing” important events at the correct time. Alerts can let managers know when a vehicle is not supposed to be moving, if there’s any unusual behavior, when drivers are speeding up, or if there are other events that are set up for alerts.
This helps to minimize the need to monitor a fleet dashboard on a continuous basis. Rather, the system can indicate situations for attention. Managers are then free to focus on the real exceptions instead of dealing with routine journeys.
Building a Data-Driven Fleet Strategy
Not all businesses require the same amount of data. The primary need of some fleets might be location tracking, while others may require vehicle diagnostics, driver identification, camera integration or even more advanced connectivity. Hardware should then be chosen in line with the business question(s) to which it is supposed to provide a response.
When companies are thinking about implementing vehicle tracking devices, they should take into account installation options, connectivity, data needs, vehicle compatibility, scalability, and software compatibility. To meet diverse vehicle and asset tracking requirements, Radius supplies telematics devices tailored to a range of applications, including solutions that are able to capture location and additional vehicle data.
How to Create a Data-Driven Fleet Strategy
The largest opportunity is when businesses employ telematics as a decision-making tool. Use historical data to identify trends and real-time data to make decisions. All of these can provide a manager with a better understanding of fleet performance and make more accurate route, vehicle utilization, maintenance, fuel usage and driver behavior decisions.
The outcome is a more cohesive fleet with decisions no longer made based on intuition. The potential for telematics hardware to transform normal driving into business intelligence ranges from using it to cut down on burning fuel and disrupting maintenance schedules to using it for vehicle routing, security and customer communication. The benefit for connected fleets won’t be one that’s just for businesses that gather the most data.
