The impact of fleet telematics on operations & productivity
February 06, 2023
Data can significantly enhance the ability to analyze your fleet operations and make informed decisions. In fact, fleet telematics is proven to help identify 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 datapoints for the use of 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.
Productivity improvements yield significant service revenue increases
After experiencing substantial service ticket backlogs, a fleet with over 4,300 units in the security industry partnered with Element Fleet Management to gain insights into how their technicians were spending their days and, through consultative expertise, identify how to improve the productivity and revenue of their services.
Tailored fleet telematics capabilities help establish a baseline
Before partnering with Element and implementing a telematics solution, the client lacked visibility to how their vehicles were being used on a day-to-day basis. Through a customized management dashboard, Element experts helped them set expectations with their drivers about how the data is used and gain a robust baseline understanding of driver behavior and route inefficiencies. This information amplifies which opportunities to prioritize 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 deliver fleet operations improvements
Increased visibility from fleet telematics data allowed the client to establish operational key performance indictors (KPIs) critical to improving their business and identify and implement specific guidelines for fleet drivers about productive versus non-productive stops and routes during the workday.
By seeing the holistic picture and placing accountability with their drivers, the fleet saw tremendous and impactful results, including 325,400 total productivity hours gained per year.
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.
Maintaining fleet efficiency enhancements
Once telematics data is leveraged to realize improvements and results, it is vital to maintain a strong grasp on fleet performance. Changes to business operations and objectives, seasonal fluctuations common for your business, and company changes such as fleet right-sizing 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 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 action on fleet policy compliance.
In addition to implementation, policies should be reviewed, updated and redistributed annually, or more often if necessary, to ensure alignment to business strategies and objectives. - Administration and enforcement to maintain policy compliance
Equally important to having fleet policies and procedures is the significance of making sure the guidelines are clearly communicated, understood and enforced. Managers should maintain regular conversations with drivers about driving behavior both for the purpose of positive reinforcement and recognition and about habits that should be improved as identified through telematics data.
The Element telematics team can assist 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.
Additionally, connected fleets collect and transmit extensive data related to location and a new fleet policy related to information gathering requires openness and disclosure about how the data is used and why it’s important to the shared goals of the fleet and company. - Fleet point of interest management
The point of interest (POI) analysis and geofences established during the initial baseline stage of implementing a telematics program should be reviewed regularly to ensure parameters are still valid and contributing to optimal fleet operations. Element can advise you on the best optimization strategy and how leveraging connected solutions data contributes to the strategy.
Benefits of fleet telematics
Improved productivity can have a trickle-down effect that can positively impact many areas of your fleet and business. POI optimizations contribute to maximized revenue generating tasks and improved 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 identifying 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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