What are the Benefits of Fleet Telematics? Let’s Find Out

As you go on the hunt for ways to improve fleet management, you’ve inevitably have run across fleet telematics. You’ve probably even gone as far as weighing the benefits of fleet telematics against its costs.

It all comes down to the same question: is it worth it?

But should it? The real question you should be asking yourself is, can my fleet run properly without it?

Imagine this scenario. You are coaching your son’s little league team.

You work hard to teach them the fundamentals, coach them, and give them the ability to play the game.

It’s game day. The kids are ready, the field is set, and it’s time to play ball. Then, you walk into the concession stand and lock yourself in the storage closet. Since you know the kids are ready and you trust their ability and desire to win will result in a victory, so staring at the brick wall behind the nacho cheese tubs is sufficient.

Of course, no coach would ever do that. A good coach needs to be involved in the game, giving instructions, changing plays, and engaging his players. But many fleet managers don’t do this.

They don’t engage. They trust that everything will be well. And they lock themselves in their offices and basically stare at a wall.

Yes, most of us do go into the field and engage with drivers. And managers and drivers exchange many phone calls throughout the day to solve problems. But these interactions will never show you the game as it’s happening.

The best you can hope for is to have minimal issues and complaints from customers during the day. A semi-quiet day is considered a good day in most companies. If a manager has been keeping the process flowing, then it’s a win.

A good leader or coach must be aware of what is going on around him. But in the game today, how can you win when you can’t see the players, the plays, or the score until the game is over?

You can’t. Not unless you have a system in place that allows you to manage drivers and vehicles in real-time.

That’s where having a robust fleet telematics system comes into play.

A New Tech Solution To Old Fleet Management Problems

Every day, you send out a fleet of expensive vehicles filled with expensive products to your customers as safely and efficiently as you can. You hope nothing goes wrong, but surprises happen.

Service delays, traffic delays, and accidents all impact performance. Most importantly, customer expectations are not met when your daily plan goes wrong. The data you need to make decisions is limited and arrives too late to impact events in a meaningful way. Trying to correct problems with aggregate financial reports and post-game metrics is like reading a box score from yesterday’s game.

How can we, as good leaders who actively work very hard for effective fleet management, really know what is going on? We need to watch the game. We need to be aware of what happens as it happens.

What we need is real-time data.

Stay in the Game with Real-Time Analytics

Fleet telematics solves this problem. It provides real-time data that helps you understand vehicle usage and create programs to keep expenses at a minimum when surprises happen. It also helps you on a micro-level, like reducing idling and improving vehicle maintenance programs.

The value for vehicle-centric improvements is clear, but that is only half of the opportunity. The ability to use telematics to immediately impact driver behavior is the most important, yet most overlooked value of this technology. Often, adding telematics will automatically reduce mileage as drivers becomes aware their days are being tracked. Drivers are more likely to stay on their route and are generally safer when they know somebody is watching. Telematics acts as your eyes to manage your fleet and people in real time.

Understand How Your People Drive

But a true awareness of your field operations, an awareness of what your drivers are doing with their vehicles, can’t be achieved without data, without a tool to manage your drivers in the field. This is why telematics is so important.

Here’s another way to look at the problem. A manager comes out of his office and looks at the floor of cubicles. He hears the workers grinding away, typing and talking. From time to time their heads pop above the cubicle walls. With little effort, he can see the status of the workforce. And he can further increase engagement and awareness by walking around, correcting actions, and coaching. This type of interaction is not possible when you have a field workforce.

Telematics tech, like Roadnet Telematics, improves fleet management by giving a manager the ability to engage in their daily operations, for a single vehicle or the entire fleet. It lets you gain a comprehensive understanding of how your people drive, improving efficiency, route plan adherence, and safety compliance.

Ready to experience the benefits of fleet telematics for yourself? Click here to watch a free, three-minute demo and see how Roadnet Telematics can revolutionize your fleet.

How Roadnet Telematics Can Help You

Roadnet Telematics provides higher situational awareness by letting managers know where every driver and vehicle is in real time. You can use this data to understand and change behaviors to root out unnecessary costs.

The telemetry data provides evidence to understand what really happened after a service failure, accident, or off-route event. Without telematics, investigating and resolving these issues is tough because there is little information available. With telematics, all the data you need is there. The right data helps protect you and your team from safety, false legal claims, and unjustified expenses.

Real-time, analytical data is one of the driving benefits of fleet telematics. Having this data enables you to:

• Improve management of fleet resources.

• Reduce fleet fuel costs by reducing vehicle idling.

• Capture useful information for proactive maintenance.

• Reduce fleet costs by making your vehicles last longer through safety and maintenance improvement.

• Validate incidents reported to a 1-800 Safe Driving number

Tracking KPIs That Matter

Capturing fleet management key performance indicators is crucial. Without it, you lack the data you need to make informed decisions that impact your bottomline.

Roadnet Telematics reduces speeding, harsh braking, harsh acceleration, and harsh cornering. Plus, since your drivers will be safer, accident claims and overall insurance costs will also decline. It’s powered by GPS, allowing managers to locate stolen vehicles, track vehicles 24 hours a day and know immediately where there is unauthorized vehicle usage. GPS tracking improves daily route adherence, routing metrics, and the routing process (such as service times and geocode validations).

Now you can capture actual arrival, departure, and driving time, which lets you optimize departure based on traffic congestion, delivery windows, and frequency of visits.

Roadnet also empowers you to save fuel by ensuring that routes are optimized and scheduled routes match actual activity. Telematics data helps you do this by integrating into your routing process.

And none of these options can be easily accomplished without Roadnet Telematics. This is the catalyst for change. Given the competition of operating a fleet in today’s world, the question isn’t why don’t you have telematics — it’s how can you function without it?

But Can You Afford It?

Although Roadnet Telematics is on the cutting edge of technology, some may say, “That’s great, but I can’t afford the cutting edge.” These people continue to use the blunt side of the blade, hack away, and wonder why costs are so high.

You all know the old saying, “you have to spend money to make money.” Here, you need to spend money to save money.

But how much money?

Roadnet Telematics gives you the ability to track drivers and vehicles in real-time for as low as $24.95/month. Plus with Omnitracs, you don’t need to pay for hardware.

When it comes to fleet management, the worst thing you can do is work hard with the wrong tools. You’re basically working blindfolded. You don’t even know why your cost-cutting measures aren’t working because you can’t even tell if the blade is upside down.

Now What If Managers Stay In Their Offices More?

Another fear is that adopting telematics leads to fleet managers getting stuck behind a desk, leading to fewer managers in the field interacting with drivers and customers.

Lucky for you, that is not the case with Roadnet Telematics. Our telematics platform does the work for you, capturing large volumes of data, summarizing it with powerful analytics, and presenting the results in user-friendly graphs and reports.

Measuring driver performance is easy. Instead of forcing your managers to collect data and analyze reports, it gives you the right information when you need it so you can focus on execution. With this data, you can monitor multiple driver activities to develop protocols and policies for improving key metrics. Performance data can be used to identify opportunities to reduce fleet operating costs and track performance against your new policies.

Now, you can finally act based on data instead of assumptions and anecdotal evidence.

Admittedly, changing driver behavior can be difficult because it requires heavy driver observation, extensive manual data collection, and less-than-enthusiastic driver participation. Telematics gets you closest to solving the awareness problem. There is no other way to comprehensively “be aware.”

Roadnet Telematics makes sure your efficiency programs are executed intelligently. It helps every company have the most cost effective operation. It also gives you the data to make the right decisions, rapidly drive bad performance out, and track your vehicles in real-time. Be aware or beware.

Get Started with Roadnet Telematics Today

Now that you know all the benefits of fleet telematics, it’s time to see it for yourself. Watch a free, three-minute demo that demonstrates the power of telematics.