Inefficient fleet management can cost your business time, money, productivity, and customers. Turn things around and boost efficiency for your business with fleet tracking technology from Crystal Ball. Fleet managers can depend on our vehicle tracking solutions for data integrity and real-time insights they can use to enhance operational efficiency in various ways.
Discover the benefits of real-time monitoring, optimised routing, and reduced idle-time, and learn how these features can enhance productivity, lower your business’ costs, assist with managing fleet maintenance, enhance driver behaviour, and ensure compliance.
The Negative Impact of Inefficient Fleet Management
Whether your business has a fleet of five or 500 vehicles, a good fleet management system is vital to its success. Fleet tracking systems play a pivotal role in fleet management. Inefficient management can impact your business negatively in several different areas. Potential effects of this include:
– Inefficient operations
– Reduced productivity
– Increased fuel and repair costs
– A lack of data-driven decision-making
– Compliance and safety risks
– Customer dissatisfaction
With this in mind, let’s examine how the benefits of robust and reliable fleet tracking software can make a positive difference.
Real-Time Fleet Monitoring
Whether your fleet’s vehicles are parked in a lot or on the road, anything could happen to them. Misuse of vehicles, theft, delays caused by congestion or unauthorised breaks, and collisions can affect your business through reduced productivity, downtime, repairs associated with wear and tear, increased fuel consumption, higher insurance premiums, missed deadlines, negative publicity, and loss of reputation.
With Crystal Ball’s fleet tracking solutions, fleet managers receive pinpoint accurate, real-time location data. Thanks to regular updates on vehicle journeys and locations, you can see individual drivers’ locations or the entire fleet’s movements at a glance. The tracking devices’ advanced GPS technology can send out hourly location updates when vehicles are stationary or their engines are off, which helps reduce the risk of vehicle misuse or theft.
Route Optimisation
Not optimising the routes taken by your fleet can waste time and money. In 2022, the average UK driver lost £707 or 80 hours due to traffic congestion. To make matters worse, 79 of 110 urban areas experienced increases in traffic delays year-on-year. Congestion isn’t only a result of a vast number of vehicles on the narrow roads in most urban areas. It can also be caused by inclement weather, construction work, or other factors. Inefficient routes aren’t limited to congested roads. They might be shorter, faster routes to the same destination which your fleet’s drivers don’t know about or prefer not to use.
Fleet tracking systems from Crystal Ball can play a powerful role in route optimisation. By optimising the routes your fleet uses, you can use less fuel, enhance efficiency, save time and money, meet deadlines, and ensure customer satisfaction. Vehicle tracking can also come in useful if your business has a grey fleet of employees’ private vehicles for which they receive a fuel allowance.
Rather than predicting traffic or providing information on better route planning, these systems provide insightful on-demand reports detailing vehicle routes, movements, and other analytics. You can use these reports to optimise routes as well as to refine other fleet strategies for greater efficiency. In addition to time savings and cost savings, optimising your routes can help your business meet its green goals of reduced carbon emissions through your vehicles using less fuel and spending less time on the roads.
Efficient Maintenance Management for Less Downtime
Fleet maintenance can be a headache for managers who need to schedule regular servicing as well as unplanned repairs. Inefficient maintenance management can lead to vehicles missing the regular services needed to keep them in good condition. It can also see minor issues escalate into much larger problems that could result in disruptive downtime and much higher repair bills than were necessary.
Crystal Ball’s fleet tracking software’s dashboard displays key tracking data. Use analytics such as historical journeys and driver behaviour in addition to on-demand reports detailing mileage and engine hour tracking to identify potential issues and support effective maintenance management. You can make provision for proactive maintenance, which can reduce the chances of vehicles requiring downtime and costly repairs further down the line.
Fleet tracking systems can also be an effective lifeline in the event of vehicle breakdowns or accidents. Use precise location data to send roadside assistance or a replacement vehicle, or to find the nearest service centres for minimised interruption to your business’ operations.
Driver Monitoring to Encourage Good Driving
Aggressive driving, excessive idling, harsh braking, rapid acceleration, speeding, tailgating, using a mobile phone or smoking while driving, and other bad driving practices impact the safety of your drivers and vehicles as well as that of other road users. They can also contribute to inefficiencies and higher costs in your business.
Increased fuel consumption through speeding, harsh braking, rapid acceleration, and idling is one way that bad driving can affect your business. Idling can also have a negative impact on the environment. Bad driving also leads to higher repair and maintenance costs, with one of the most obvious examples of this being the shortening of brake pads’ lifespan through harsh braking. Another example is the wear and tear done to the engine and the electrical and transmission systems by excessive idling. Drivers who are careless in their handling of or care for vehicles in your fleet also contribute to increased maintenance costs.
If your drivers are stopped for traffic violations or cause accidents through bad or reckless driving, your business could be faced with lawsuits. You could also be looking at paying higher insurance premiums. Use Crystal Ball’s fleet tracking systems to monitor drivers and encourage good driving practices.
Powerful inward-facing dash cams can detect driver behaviours such as mobile phone usage while driving, smoking while driving, distracted driving (eyes looking to the left or right for too long), eyes closing or drivers falling asleep, yawning, the driver’s head being lowered (falling asleep at the wheel), and the absence of the driver at the wheel while the vehicle is in motion. In the case of each of these events, the tracking system alerts the driver in the cab. An alert is also sent to the fleet manager. By sending alerts to drivers, these systems encourage drivers to improve their behaviour or take a rest break. This encouragement to better driving happens without any additional time or cost to fleet managers or businesses.
Additionally, fleet managers can use driver behaviour analysis and in-cab alerts to identify and discourage bad driving practices. The fleet trackers use real-time data and accelerometer feedback to highlight instances such as acceleration, speeding, harsh braking, and cornering. The driver will be alerted immediately, encouraging them to improve their driving. Fleet managers receive reports about these instances, enabling them to make data-driven decisions for addressing these issues further. The system also produces a driver league table, which showcases driver performance data and incentivises better driving.
Enhanced Efficiency with Fleet Tracking
Crystal Ball’s fleet tracking solutions make possible safer, more efficient, and cost-effective fleet management. In addition to reaping benefits such as savings on time and money, effective maintenance management, and improved driver behaviour, your business can also build and maintain healthy relationships with customers while enhancing its reputation among them.
If you would like to make fleet tracking systems part of your company’s fleet management, there are several factors to consider. Among them are the size of the fleet and the types of vehicles in it, the needs of the business and the daily tasks involved, and the installation method (self-install or installation by professionals). By choosing the right fleet tracking features for your business and its vehicles, you can take advantage of this powerful technology’s transformative potential to boost efficiency.
To find out more about Crystal Ball’s dash cams and apps contact us today. We can help you to boost your efficiency and your bottom lines.