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What is fleet tracking & why do you need it for your business?

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What is fleet tracking & why do you need it for your business?

Understanding fleet tracking, and its many uses for businesses, is key to creating a successful and growing fleet. But before you can make decisions about how to grow to your company, and in order to best utilise this tool for your fleet of vehicles, you need to be clear on what fleet tracking is and how it works.

What is fleet tracking?

Fleet tracking is a fleet management system, and one that is often used by businesses with multiple vehicles such as delivery companies. Fleet tracking, also known as vehicle tracking, is enabled by installing a small device within each of the vehicles in your fleet. It then automatically collects data from your vehicle.

What makes each fleet tracking software provider unique is the way in which they collate and display the information that is collected. Movolytics, for example, offers an interface that works across different devices, including desktop, tablet and mobile. They collect information that can readily be used to investigate aspects such as: fuel usage, driver speed and route taken. All of which can be displayed in real time as graphs, charts and data streams.

What can fleet tracking show me (and what can’t it)?

Fleet tracking allows you to view a number of different sets of data about your fleets. Thanks to the broad capabilities of telematics, using a singular device you can collect and examine a number of elements of your vehicle, and therefore your fleet as a whole. Of which, the most important to your business are:

  1. Vehicle locations – for anyone managing multiple vehicles at once, for deliveries or transport purposes, tracking vehicle locations seems the most basic requirement. However, you can do more with this data than simply identify where you fleet is.
    1. If you know where your fleet it, then you can advice of how to avoid traffic jams and closed roads.
    2. It allows you to share accurate estimated arrival times, and share them with customers.
  2. Fuel usage – using fleet tracking, you will be able to see a spectrum of data points for fuel usage, such as fuel consumption rate and fuel efficiency, which in turn helps to identify fuel wastage. Combined, this can give you a more accurate picture of how effectively your fleet is operating.
  3. Driver behaviour – depending on the fleet tracking that you choose, and how the provider displays your data, you will be able to build up driver profiles. Driver behaviour can help you to find and remedy issues with:
    1. specific drivers – if they are braking too hard and wasting fuel, or making unscheduled stops.
    2. routes – are there consistently high traffic routes which are wasting your driver’s time.
    3. vehicles – you may find that certain vehicles in your fleet are less fuel efficient or unnecessarily increasing your eco footprint.

For each of these areas, you can view data for each specific vehicle in your fleet, as well as use collated data to inspect trends across your fleet of vehicles.

 Use collated data to drive growth in your company

Even if you only consider what we’ve outlined here; the benefits of vehicle tracking using an easy to access and monitor system, it is clear that you can locate quick wins and daily benefits for your business. No fleet of vehicles is perfect and there is always room to minimise your spend.

Cost is often what decisions about your growth comes down to, and it’s a consistent trends across any business. A need to reduce costs or improve your return on investment is universal. Without these tactics, that use real and specific data to your business, how can you expect to expand in a feasible way?

Data driven decisions are must for any business. While this might have (and still include) using spreadsheets and manual data input to monitor changes, any system that makes it easier should be utilised to its fullest. One of the biggest benefits of the technological developments of the last few years is that app development is catering to more specific industries and users, like with fleet tracking.

The advantage of using fleet tracking specifically to drive business growth is that you won’t be working from any guesswork. This can make difficult decisions, like which drivers to lose in order to maintain your high fuel efficiency rates, or when you can afford to hire purchase new vehicles for your fleet, easier.

I am the founder of Startup Today. I am the main writer and have put in many hours of work into creating this blog. If you want to find out more about me then lets get in contact.

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