Fleet Management Tracking
How Fleet Management Tracking Can Save You Money.

Fleet Management Tracking Systems Have Come A Long Way

Business fleet management tracking systems used to consist of timecards turned in at the end of the day, plus monthly statistics on mileage along with analysis of fuel expenses, driver hours and the like-in determining the total expense involved in shipping products to customers.

Experienced fleet drivers kept in their heads checklists of best practices, and passed them along to rookie drivers who learned to apply them in saving money for their employers.

No more. Today's fleet management tracking systems are part of a proactive strategy for reducing transportation expense and improving the bottom line, to stay competitive in the marketplace. How did it all become so much more interesting? The era of computers and GPS satellites brought new tracking technologies that make it possible to micro-manage expenditures in a way unimagined in earlier eras.

State of the art fleet management tracking systems send continuous data updates on each fleet vehicle to a central point, where the data is evaluated—along with live traffic and weather reports, and the organization's constantly changing needs data—to determine the most efficient utilization of vehicle fleets throughout the day.

One system marketed by GPS Logic allows factors such as vehicle location, speed and direction of travel, time spend per delivery, alerts for things like engine idling time, PTO usage, speeding, low fuel level or battery reading, and a range of other custom data—to be continually plotted at one-second intervals throughout the workday. The data is juxtaposed with weather and traffic updates, and then analyzed and compared to averages, and ultimately used to modify vehicle assignment and routing so as to constantly whittle away at inefficiencies.

The command center for all this is an organization's dispatch center, where management is able to view the theater of operations on screens that, in the GPS Logic system, allow them zoom between representations of the entire transport region and those of individual vehicles—in seconds, on the same screen and often at the push of a single button.

Being able to overlay vehicle locations with live traffic conditions and route drivers around traffic jams or road closures is seen as absolutely essential to fleet management tracking systems in the age of global positioning satellites. Sometimes opportunities to cut transport costs jump out at you—as in rerouting of vehicles to grasp advantages in traffic flows. Other times the savings will come from patiently comparing delivery times for various drivers or vehicles, times of the day, routes taken, and so on. The result is much better vehicle use and far greater fleet efficiency for those organizations that use the new technology.

It pays to give your operation the most detailed and most continuous data flow you can afford. Your bottom line will increasingly come to depend on it.