For managing multiple commercial vehicles, whether it’s 10 or 10,000, the challenge is real. From coordinating routes to keeping up with drivers’ behaviour and fuel usage or maintaining optimum utilisation of vehicles —- it is not an easy feat.
For quite some years, fleet managers have been doing it with endless calls, no visibility and hard to maintain spreadsheets. But such manual process instead of bringing structure are only depleting resources and profits.
With powerful technological shift underway like fleet management software, this problem is no longer a concern. This tech has been helping logistics businesses go from reactive, disorderly process to a more streamlined and data-driven operation. They are gaining control over every aspect of their fleet operations.
Let’s understand how fleet tracking software is helping fleet operators reduce costs, boost fleet productivity and improve compliance in the process.
How Fleet Management Technology is Streamlining Multi Vehicle Operations in Logistics?
1. Real-Time Visibility into Multi-Vehicle Locations
Fleet management technology brings one of the most revolutionary features which is live GPS tracking. It helps fleet managers fetch real-time location, mileage, distance travelled and routes of the operating fleet.
Such real-time locational intelligence helps fleet managers stay aware of their fleet’s current location and whereabouts. This prevents them from making endless calls to drivers, as every data of thousands of fleets is visible over an analytical dashboard.
This helps them see entire fleet live over a digital map. No matter it’s a delivery truck end route to a delivery client or a fleet vehicle are bunching or overtaking each other or maybe driver idling for too long. This helps in enhancing visibility, take care of customer demands, and manage time better.
2. Automated Route Planning and Optimization
Earlier fleet operators would manually plan routes and assign trips to each one of their drivers. Imagine how time taking would that be? But with modern fleet management software accompanied by a smart algorithm driven route planning software, it’s quite easy to plan and assign routes in a few minutes.
The fleet management solutions clubbed with route planning module helps pre-plan the economical routes, trips and tours for the multi-vehicle fleet with waypoints, POI and geofences. Along with the option to sequence halts and decide duration of each halt.
All this helps ensure smarter travel times, fewer delays, and lower fuel costs. This helps improve customer experience by ensuring on-time arrivals and dynamic ETAs.
3. Centralized Multi-haul Fleet Data Management
Fleet operations help generate a heap of data around:
- Vehicle usage
- Driver behavior
- Fuel consumption and logs
- Maintenance records
- Compliance checklists
Without a centralized fleet tracking software system, this data is hard to collate and circulate across departments. Thus, making it hard to make informed decisions.
Fleet management platforms help collate such data over a single, analytical dashboard. This helps fleet managers filter insights by:
- Vehicle data & performance
- Driver behaviour and analytics
- Fleet location
- Date & day of operation
Such data helps give them clear picture of all the performance trends and possible problem areas. By having such structure data at one’s disposal, it helps fleet managers transform fleet operations from reactive to proactive.
4. Better Driver Behavior Analysis & Accountability
For logistics businesses, fleet drivers are crucial for successful fleet operations. However, without any technological aid, monitoring their performance on the road is always the grey area. This is possible to track and manage with driver behaviour monitoring and video telematics solutions inherent in fleet management software like TrackoBit.
Such combination of fleet tech is very helpful in detecting harsh braking, over speeding, idling and unauthorised stops. Such level of visibility and transparency helps in fixing the driving patterns and promote fuel efficient driving. Some systems like TrackoBit offers smart driver scorecard that scores drivers according to their driving patterns. Every score is visible on the leaderboard — this motivates drivers to strive for positive scores.
Better driving doesn’t just help lower fuel costs —- it also helps reduce risks of accidents, vehicle wear & tear and hefty insurance premiums.
5. Predictive Maintenance & Downtime Reduction
Unplanned breakdowns don’t just cost businesses money; they also stall the entire delivery operations. But with feet tech, it’s quite easy for drivers to file DVIR reports (before start & end of each trip), schedule reminders for vehicle repair and routine maintenance for custom days and requirements. The system shoots timely reminders for proactive routine check — this prevents drivers from facing sudden, mid-stop halts.
Based on mileage, vehicle usage patterns, and historical breakdown trends, such fleet system can help schedule preventive maintenance routine. This helps vehicle stay in peak condition. Moreover, this reduces cost on surprise repairs and extends vehicle life too.
Any multi-vehicle operations cannot afford to have even a slight amount of downtime because it can have massive impact on the overall productivity. Thus, fleet tracking software is quite important.
6. Fuel Analytics and Usage Management
Fuel for commercial vehicles operations is one of the largest recurring costs. Without having live visibility of fleet operations and fuel consumption, it’s hard to identify where the waste is happening. You cannot identify what’s causing the fuel consumption, whether it’s idling, inefficient or rash driving, frequent long detours, or theft/siphoning.
Fleet tech comes inherent with fuel management system that provides analytics of overall fuel usage with complete reports and consumption patterns. Most fleet management platforms even allow you to integrate fuel cards — in case you want to cross-check fuel purchases against the total mileage and distance the vehicle covered across locations.
7. Fleet Compliance Made Easy
Meeting fleet compliance is a must for fleet operators. It includes — vehicle inspections, driver licenses adherence, insurance renewals, updating route permits. Skipping these basic but important compliances can lead to business downtime, penalties and in most cases legal trouble.
Fleet management solutions provide helps managing fleet compliance all digitally. It takes care of all the requirements by offering automated reminders, quick documents uploads, filling the inspection DVIR checklists for auditing purposes.
All these features in fleet tracking software helps ensure you are always step ahead of all the pertaining regulatory issues.
8. Fleet Operations Scalability Without Losing Control
For growing businesses, growing with vehicle size leads to more confusion than structure. The burden gets real when you have more drivers to manage, data to collect and logistics operations to sync and coordinate with.
But with cloud-based fleet management software it is easy to balance and scale ops without breaking bad. With this tech, you can easily manage 5 to 5000 vehicles without getting into cusp of complexity.
The software makes it easy for you to onboard new drivers, add upon new types of vehicles, manage operations across multi-haul routes with complete visibility and management over an analytical dashboard.
Final Thoughts!
Earlier, feet management was often seen as unpredictable or stressful job. But today, all thanks to the advanced technology, the process is well-orchestrated, finely tuned, data-driven — that brings clarity and structure.
The tech takes care of the entire fleet management lifecycle with live GPS tracking, smart routing, fuel monitoring and fleet compliance. Today’s automated fleet tech is re-shaping how multi-vehicle operations run. Fleet businesses are saving money. It is also helping businesses gain speed, control and agility in parallel with competitive landscape.
As the industry continues to evolve, fleet operators that will embrace fleet management software are moving towards simplified fleet management. Want the same for your business?
