Soaring costs have fleet managers throughout the UK faced with the challenge of saving money while boosting productivity. The overall rate of inflation in the country since 2020 has been approximately 22%, but fleets have seen the cost of vehicle replacement parts rise by an extra 13%. Leveraging cutting-edge technology, fleet tracking strategies like Crystal Ball’s FleetTracker can help save your business money and increase productivity.
Tracking Vehicles In a Nutshell
Crystal Ball’s technology for fleet tracking vehicles combines GPS and telematics, creating a robust combination of onboard diagnostics, informatics, and telecommunications. Fleet trackers provide ongoing coaching to drivers and a wealth of insights and information to fleet managers.
At the touch of a button, you can track vehicle location, movements, behaviour, status, journey history, and other metrics. Using these insights, you can make data-driven decisions and implement strategies that will result in increased production and significant cost savings.
Powerful Fleet Tracking Strategies
Discover several powerful vehicle tracker cost saving and production boosting strategies below.
1. Reduce Fuel Costs
The average price of diesel fuel in the UK increased by almost 48% between June 2021 and June 2022. While diesel and petrol prices have dropped slightly, the pressure’s still on fleet managers to reduce fuel costs. Petrol and diesel are one of the biggest expenses for businesses with fleets of any size, but reducing those costs isn’t as simple as trying to find faster routes between A and B.
The severity of acceleration and deceleration, vehicle speed, time spent in congested traffic, and unnecessary idling can all contribute to higher fuel consumption. Use fleet tracking technology to monitor these incidents and gain insights into why your fleet’s fuel consumption is higher than it needs to be.
While tracking vehicles should be enough of a deterrent for your drivers to keep the speed down for improved fuel economy, you can also use the insights you gain to implement other strategies described below, such as route optimisation and driver behaviour monitoring, to save your business money and gain other benefits.
2. Optimise Routes
Use the data available to fleet managers through Crystal Ball’s fleet trackers to optimise the routes used by your business drivers. By tracing vehicle locations and journey histories, paying attention to routes, distance, and journey times, you can determine which drivers are not using optimal routes. The shortest route distance-wise isn’t necessarily the fastest route, and while combining urban and suburban driving might work in some instances, it will result in less fuel efficiency.
Analysing journeys can also help you spot issues such as misuse of company vehicles, unauthorised breaks, and long journeys on which drivers do not take the required rest breaks. Finding the optimal routes and dealing with vehicle misuse and other problems can result in lower costs, less time wastage, faster deliveries, and a more efficient fleet.
3. Reduce Paperwork for Greater Productivity
Tracking vehicles using advanced systems that incorporate GPS and AI can automate many manual processes that take time and money. You and your employees can then direct the time you save toward core business activities and more important tasks, resulting in greater productivity. This also means saving money on back-office administrative costs.
With fleet tracking software in place, you can track vehicle operational hours and drivers’ schedules to ensure they are paid what they are owed. You can also verify overtime claims easily and accurately. The drivers themselves no longer need to record journeys, monitor mileage and other metrics, or complete timesheets and large amounts of other paperwork.
4. Monitor Drivers for Reduced Wear, Tear, and Waste
Drivers can be responsible for a significant amount of vehicle wear and tear, as well as for wasted time and fuel, which translates to higher costs and lower productivity for your business. Use driver monitoring software to reduce wear and tear, discourage waste, and save money for your business. At the same time, the fleet tracking and driver monitoring system will provide your drivers with ongoing coaching and encouragement to adopt good driving practices.
The fleet tracking system will alert drivers whenever they accelerate or brake harshly, turn sharply, speed, or leave vehicles idling. When combined with the inward-facing dash cam, the system also alerts drivers to behaviours such as distracted driving, yawning, smoking, or using a mobile phone while driving. Fleet managers can also access information about these incidents.
Crystal Ball’s FleetTracker also scores drivers for reporting and league table purposes. The system bases driver scores on five KPIs, namely speeding, acceleration, cornering, braking, and idling. Fleet managers can use the reports to analyse what drivers are doing and whether there are issues that need to be addressed, and they can use the league tables to incentivise good driving behaviours. Incentivisation can further encourage drivers to be more conscientious of their driving practices.
By alerting drivers to bad driving practices and encouraging them to adopt better ones, the system can help reduce wear and tear on brake pads, and the engine, electrical, and transmission systems. This ultimately saves your business money by reducing the need for costly repairs further down the line. Reduced idling also means less fuel is wasted as well as reduced carbon emissions. In the longer term, your fleet vehicles will have a higher residual value.
5. Optimise Fleet Maintenance
Following on from the above point, tracking vehicles can help you optimise fleet maintenance. Breakdowns result in vehicle downtime, which costs money and lowers productivity, leading to revenue losses. Tracking vehicle journeys and driver behaviour and taking advantage of insights offered by tracking software’s on-demand reports feature allows you to optimise fleet maintenance.
You can determine whether your fleet’s existing maintenance schedule is helpful and whether you can find ways to optimise it for better results. Adopt a proactive approach to fleet maintenance for savings on repair costs, fewer interruptions to operations, and increased productivity.
6. Minimise Risk of Theft
Vehicle theft is a massive expense for businesses with fleets. The cost of a stolen vehicle goes beyond the replacement value. You’re also faced with reduced productivity due to downtime, extra transport costs and wear and tear on other vehicles in the fleet, higher insurance premiums, potential loss of goods or equipment, and damaged relationships with customers.
While technology for tracking vehicles cannot prevent theft, it can deter would-be thieves from stealing them. Even if thieves ignore the fleet tracker and steal a vehicle, this technology means you can monitor the vehicle’s whereabouts and report its exact location to the police, making it much easier to recover the vehicle.
7. Take Advantage of Insurance Discounts
Systems for tracking vehicles can allow you to take advantage of the discounted rates offered by some insurers. With vehicle tracking and driver monitoring technology in place, your drivers will adopt safer driving behaviours, you can adopt a proactive maintenance policy, the vehicles in your fleet will experience less wear and tear, and thieves will hopefully be deterred.
All these factors combine to give you a much lower risk profile in the eyes of insurance companies, many of which offer discounted rates to businesses that use fleet trackers and driver behaviour monitoring dash cams. In addition to saving your business money, this potentially means fewer insurance claims on your part, ultimately making for a better relationship with your insurer.
Fleet Tracking Can Benefit Your Business
These fleet tracking strategies show how tracking vehicles and monitoring driver behaviour can benefit businesses of any size and servicing any sector by saving costs and increasing productivity. Take advantage of this technology and transform the way you manage your fleet of cars, trucks, vans, or HGVs.
Contact us to learn more about Crystal Ball’s dash cams and fleet tracking technology. We’ll help your business save money, time, and resources.