The impact of fleet telematics on operations & productivity
November 13, 2024

Data can significantly enhance your ability to analyze fleet operations and make informed decisions. In fact, fleet telematics is proven to help find gaps and inefficiencies in your fleet that, when addressed, can enhance productivity, resulting in reduced fleet risks and related costs, increased revenue, and boosted client satisfaction.
What is fleet telematics?
Fleet telematics is data-gathering technology used to extract and centralize data points for analysis and decision-making. Connected fleets continuously create and transmit telematics data, streamlining the flow of information and helping to improve fleet performance, cost and safety.
How does telematics work?
Put simply, telematics allows remote management of fleet assets. Telematics fleet management provides an analytical landscape to more easily identify measurable opportunities to progress and achieve business objectives including:
- Fleet vehicle location,
- Fuel usage,
- Maintenance,
- Driver behavior that could impact safety and more.
Fleet telematics case study: Boost productivity to unlock greater service revenue potential
A security industry fleet with over 4,300 units was experiencing substantial service ticket backlogs.
Once partnering with us, our client:
- Gained visibility into how their technicians were spending their days.
- Understood how to improve their productivity and revenue.
Through a customized management dashboard, we helped set expectations with our client’s drivers about how real-time data is used and gained a robust baseline understanding of driver behavior and route inefficiencies. This information amplifies which opportunities need to be prioritized to improve the overall functions of the fleet.
Complete point of interest (POI) analysis to clearly understand driver habits:
- Start, end, and travel times for each technician and
- Number, length, and types of stops they made during the day
- Establish geofences, or virtual boundaries, to pinpoint and correct unnecessary stops and routes
Enhanced fleet telematics delivers fleet operations improvements
325,400 hours of total productivity gained per year
Reduce downtime with fleet software

Security fleet with over 4,300 vehicles. 5% decrease in total duration at garages. 11% decrease in total duration suppliers. 325,400 total productivity hours gained per year.
Increased visibility from fleet telematics data offers you the capability to establish operational key performance indicators (KPIs) critical to improving your business.
- Identify and implement guidelines for drivers that define productive vs. non-productive stops and routes during the workday
When you look at the holistic picture and place accountability with your drivers, your fleet will see tremendous and impactful improvements.
Geofencing: a key fleet management tool
Our client was able to increase productivity by strategically using geofencing.
This technology is integral to fleet telematics. It uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to create virtual boundaries around specific locations.
When a vehicle enters or exits geofenced areas, the software triggers alerts to mobile devices or computers. This capability enhances operational efficiency by ensuring vehicles adhere to their routes and schedules.
Geofencing strategy

Aerial map of fleet vehicle points of interest geofenced as blue circles.
There are two primary methods to set up boundaries around an enclosure, by drawing a shape around an area that is a “point of interest”. This could be a repair shop, parking lot, depot or land parcel. An event or time stamp will be triggered once a vehicle that enters its parameters.
Circle:
- Defines a radius around points of interest
Best used for: A quick method to set up non-specific points of interest that do not risk overlapping. In fact, our client referenced in the case study used circle geofences for their simplicity.
Polygon mapping:
- Defines the single-sided shape points of interest
Benefit: you can specifically define parameters when you stack them side-by-side and clearly see when a vehicle is at a specific location.
3 ways geofencing can increase your fleet productivity
One of the most recent enhancements to fleet telematics is geofencing. Geofencing involves creating virtual boundaries around specific locations.
These can be used in the following:
- Internal Points of interest:
Stocking garages, warehouses, and stores can be checked to find efficiencies and refine operations. - Customer locations:
Analyze the time spent at customer appointments to better understand service delivery and identify areas for improvement. - Fleet supplier network:
Track interactions with suppliers to streamline processes to reduce unnecessary delays.- Making sure your vehicle is on the road
- Monitor and measure vehicle uptime and productivity
Maintaining fleet vehicle efficiency enhancements
Once telematics data is used to get improvements and results, it is vital to keep a strong grasp on fleet performance.
Changes to business operations and goals, seasonal fluctuations common for your business, and company changes such as fleet rightsizing and growth could impact performance. Proactively planning for shifts such as these and upholding policies can increase or keep your fleet productivity consistent, depending on your desired outcome.
- Fleet vehicle policy implementation
Productivity-related policies provide fleet drivers with guidelines and standards that are needed to achieve fleet operational KPIs as identified in baseline exploration. Policies help set expectations, hold drivers accountable, and, through connected fleet solutions, track and act on fleet policy compliance.
In addition to implementation, policies should be reviewed, updated, and redistributed annually, or more often, if necessary, to ensure alignment with business strategies and objectives.
- Administration and enforcement to keep fleet policy compliance
Equally important to having fleet policies and procedures is ensuring that guidelines are clearly communicated to your drivers and that they are understood and enforced.
Managers should have regular conversations with drivers about driving behavior for positive reinforcement, recognition as well as habits that need to be improved as it is tracked by telematics data.
The Element telematics team can help in developing intervention guidelines for managers and driver training materials when experiencing repeated offences against a policy. These measures are most effective when organizations receive leadership buy-in of policy enforcement.
Any updates to your fleet safety policy related to information gathering on vehicle location tracking, requires openness and disclosure about how the data is used. It’s important to share company goals with your fleet drivers to set expectations and gain compliance.
- Fleet point of interest management
We’re here to advise you on the best optimization plan and how you can leverage connected solutions data to inform your strategy.
Regularly review point of interest (POI) analysis and geofences established during your initial baseline stage.
Ensure parameters are still valid and contribute to optimal fleet operations.
Benefits of fleet telematics
Improved productivity can have a trickle-down effect that can positively affect many areas of your fleet and business.
POI optimizations contribute to maximized revenue-generating tasks and improves maintenance downtime.
Driver behavior data can enhance fleet safety and reduce collision costs, and data collected through telematics technology make for more efficient policy enforcement conversations by clearly showing areas that need improvement.
Contact us to improve fleet productivity
If you’re ready to complete more jobs in fewer hours and kilometers /miles and gain visibility into vehicle location and route analytics, contact Element’s experts today to discover the connected fleet solution that’s right for you.
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