Virtually every fleet operator who applied appropriate tracking management will tell you that what he or she feels guilty-most in the world about is waiting. Not the deployment procedure, not the resistance to change in the driver cabin, not the process of attaining the learning curve on the platform dashboard. The waiting. Any month of operating without tracking data is a month of costs, which might have been avoided, of inefficiencies that may be recovered, and of problems that may be fixed and left safely out of sight. A courier company owner once estimated that three-year delay in his moving to fleet tracking management has cost his operation about 87,000 in recoverable fuel wastage alone. He laughed telling the story. It was not a happy laugh. Stay one step ahead of delays and inefficiencies with reliable fleet tracking management for your operations.
Operational transparency is attained within a short time when live tracking is used instead of dispatching based on assumptions. Position of vehicles, compliance to the routes, status of the driver, idle time, all this can be seen at once without even one status request. The rate of decision-making also grows. The time customer will receive an instant customer notification instead of an apology which would follow a vehicle running late. Job reassignments occur depending on an authenticated proximity as opposed to the person answering the radio. The day-to-day dispatch business ceases to be a business of controlled chaos and becomes much closer to something that is a coordinated functioning, which is actually new to dozens of fleet managers.
The domain of cutting costs with the help of fleet tracking management cuts across the budget levels in the manner that continues to flabbergast operators as they examine their initial annual comparison. Economy of route and reduction of idleness. Less money spent on accidents as a result of better driver behavior. The discounts on insurance premiums as a result of reported safety improvements. Long life of vehicles through regular preventive maintenance. None of these categories by itself changes the P&L, but all of them operating concurrently, month after month, yield financial results that put the cost of implementation in prospective embarrassment.
Driver management becomes not only data-dependent but personality-dependent also, which is a substantial operational improvement even though the current management team is as good as they wish to be. Behavioral scorecards, such as compliance speed, harsh braking rates, idle attribution per shift, provide the supervisors with specific metrics that are consistent across all observers, as opposed to impressions, which differ among observers. The professional records of Good drivers are recorded. Potential problem patterns are solved at an early stage with facts as opposed to suspicion. The cultural transition of the surveillance anxiety to performance transparency often spans approximately 60 days and has quantifiable safety gains, which goes on accruing, long after the period of transition is completed.
The costs of maintenance and compliance are financial landmines to fleets where they are handled manually – they are easy to overlook, expensive when they are encountered and can be avoided all together with well laid out systems. In order to prevent mechanical failures, automated service interval notifications prevent missed maintenance. Administrative scramble is eliminated, and regulatory documentation is up-to-date. Audit readiness is a sustained operating state as opposed to an emergency. Operating fleets that have well-managed tracking programs, incur fewer repairs each year, have less regulatory risk, and keep their vehicles in productive service significantly longer than those operations that still use their memory and spreadsheets to keep everything on track.