Whether you’re looking to gain greater oversight of your fleet, improve operational efficiency or reduce vehicle emissions, a fleet telematics system will be a vital tool. But with so many telematics providers on the market, which one is right for you?
Before you make your choice, It’s vital to take the time to know exactly what’s important to your fleet and to compare this with the features each system offers. Here are a few of the top attributes to look out for when selecting a fleet telematics platform…
Customisable reports
Let’s take driver behaviour as an example here. You may know that your fleet has a particular problem with seat belt usage, or your workshop might be reporting that they’re getting too many vehicles in for prematurely worn brake pads - indicating that you have an issue with aggressive driving - too much harsh acceleration and braking.
The best telematics platforms will enable you to customise your driver performance scorecards and reports, so that you are weighting them to the KPIs that are most important to your fleet at that moment.
In the above example, you might want to apply greater weight to seat belt usage, or excessive braking while you work with drivers on those KPIs, so that you can really crack down on them. Once you’ve got those in check, you could turn your attention to excessive speeding and increase the relative weighting for this metric instead.
Custom notifications and alerts
Another feature that’s important to be able to customise is your notifications - your time is valuable, and you don’t want to have to spend it constantly monitoring your telematics system. Instead, you want to get notified immediately when something happens that you need to respond to. Better still, you want one alert to go to one member of your operations team, and another to a particular driver. And if you find that something is a little too sensitive, then you want to be able to adjust this.
Take speeding as an example - you may initially set the system up to send you notifications every time a driver goes 10% above the speed limit. Then you find that you’re getting 50 notifications a day, and you can’t deal with them all. Instead, you recognise that it’s better to initially focus on speeding infractions in 20 and 30mph zones. Does the telematics system allow for this level of customisation?
Meanwhile, you might want to set up in-cab notifications with audible warnings for the drivers when they go over the speed limit, so that they know this behaviour is being monitored and can alter their behaviour in real-time - if so, there are some telematics systems that can offer this too.
Configurable dashboards
In a similar vein to creating custom notifications, the best telematics and fleet management systems recognise the value of your time and make it easy for you to create custom dashboards to view the trends and metrics that are most valuable to your fleet. This will allow you to jump onto the platform and immediately see the current state of your operations - is it a good day, or a bad day? Why? And what can you do to turn it around?
These metrics are different for every fleet, which is why you’ll never get the maximum value out of a standard dashboard.
End-to-end fleet management
You may start on your telematics journey because you want greater oversight of the location and performance of all of your drivers and vehicles. However, many systems can do so much more than this, integrating all of the areas of your operations into one platform for greater control. Commonly, this can include:
Preventative maintenance scheduling
Workshop management
Stock management
Asset management
Driver training and development
Tachograph management
Integration with other APIs
You may already have a dash camera system installed in your vehicles, or want to integrate your fleet management metrics into your ERP software to streamline processes. Whatever the system, you’ll need your telematics system to be able to easily integrate with third-party hardware and software solutions to prevent siloing of data and allow you to manage all elements of your fleet operations in one place.
Data support for electric vehicles
Whether you are just beginning to add EVs to your fleet or you already have some in operation, it’s critical that your telematics solution fully supports them. EVs have a number of unique metrics that need to be monitored to optimise their performance, range and ROI.
Here are some of the key questions to consider when selecting a telematics provider to support you in your electrification journey:
Can it help me identify which vehicles would be suitable to transition to electric?
Can it help me to quantify the financial and environmental savings of making a switch?
Can it help me to identify the right model of EV to transition to, based on real-world data?
How many makes and models of electric vehicles does the telematics system support?
What EV-specific data does it provide? As a minimum, this should include:- Real-time state of charge (SOC)- Electric energy usage and efficiency- Active charging status- Charging history- Carbon emission reductions
Will I be able to compare ‘fuel’ efficiency between my original ICE vehicles, and the new EVs?
Select with care to get real value out of your telematics system
Most management teams of small to medium-sized fleets are maxed out by keeping their day-to-day operations on track. This leaves you with little time to perform a comprehensive procurement process to be sure you’re getting the right telematics system for your requirements.
If this sounds familiar, but you recognise the value that a telematics system could provide, we can help.
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