There is a variant of fleet management that functions on phone calls, sticky notes and optimism, which is a vacuum that saphyroo is supposed to fill. It is effective until it is not. Then it falls in a very dramatic manner, usually at the most inconvenient moment, and with the wrong car on the wrong road and a deadline that is indifferent.
Fleet management system replaces such a shaky set up with a set up that is based on actual data. Where, speed, quantity of fuel, driver driving style, servicing of the vehicle, compliance, centralisation, visibility and actionability. Not a magic fix. A serious operational tool.
There is a bigger gap between the tracking and management than some would expect.
Simple GPS tracking informs you of the location of vehicles. A good fleet management system tells you what is going on, what is going to go wrong and what trends are gradually consuming your budget. They are totally different abilities. When operators confuse them they will tend to under invest and wonder why the problems are reoccurring.
The most evident one is maintenance. The calendar-based servicing does not have condition-based deterioration. A vehicle clocking heavy urban kilometres must be handled on another schedule than one that is involved in long highway routes at constant speeds. The engine diagnostics inputted into a fleet system generate alerts based on the actual wear and not on assumptions. The difference eliminates failures which can not be predicted by scheduling.
Waste fuel is literally right in front of our eyes. Idling. Aggressive acceleration. The courses that were rational three months ago and are not anymore. These patterns are manifested through a fleet management system. When a logistics company was tracking a 12-vehicle delivery fleet, they discovered that it was saving 23,000 in fuel wastage in the first quarter of implementation, simply by the idle time information and the new route.
The most complicated human discussions in fleet management are the driver behaviour monitoring. No one likes being observed. That’s understandable. But when the information is presented in the form of a personal performance coaching, when it is delivered to the drivers personally, when it is acknowledged that the situation has been improved, when it is handled constructively, the situation is quite different. Resistance is brought about by punitive rollouts. Open ones establish interaction.
The compliance documentation has become very consequential. Vehicle inspection records, driver certifications and Hours of Service logs are actual legal documents based on your industry and jurisdiction. The automation of such record keeping systems removes the administrative burden and the weakness where manual systems fail. We meant to update that is not a sentence that does well in an audit.
Integration is what distinguishes functional systems and transformative systems. The presence of information silos is avoided by fleet information associated with dispatch, payroll, fuel cards, and accounting systems.