The majority of mid-sized fleets now have a telematics system installed in their vehicles. These telematics systems are powerful tools that can provide valuable data, enabling managers to make informed decisions that enhance sustainability and operational efficiency.
Unfortunately, the greatest insights aren’t generally available straight out of the can.
After installation, there often follows a feeling of drowning in all the additional data the system provides. This can be a particular issue in small and medium-sized fleets, where the operations team already feels saturated with their day-to-day operational tasks and doesn’t have the time to spend interrogating the data and customising their dashboards, templates and reports to turn the raw data into the insights that will drive tangible improvements.
In this article, we break down how to unlock greater insights and value from your fleet telematics system.
Create custom dashboards
The function of a dashboard is to present critical operational activity and events across your entire fleet at a single glance.
Thinking of all the data that your telematics system collects, ask yourself the question - what are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you an instant assessment of the state of your operations? These are the reports that you will want to compile into your primary dashboard, so that as soon as you log onto the system and throughout your day, you can get immediate top-level oversight of how your fleet is performing.
Beyond this, you may wish to create secondary dashboards for specific areas of your fleet operations, such as safety, productivity and vehicle condition.
Set up notifications and alerts
While you may want to check into the platform a few times a day to view your dashboards, your time and that of your team is too valuable to be spent glued to the screen.
Notifications and alerts are incredibly useful tools for proactive fleet management, and they can be created to notify different management team members, or the driver, of specific situations.
Depending on the capabilities of your telematics system (and check out our article on the things to look out for when you’re selecting one for your fleet), you can create rules, for example exceeding a 30mph speed limit by 25%, with a notification sent to the driver’s line manager when this rule is exceeded.
Create regular reports
There are some operational issues that you, your team, and your drivers need to know instantly, but you also don’t want everyone’s inboxes to be clogged with hundreds of alerts a day - for example, every time a driver goes over the speed limit.
Instead, you can set up weekly or monthly aggregated reports, sent to the relevant members of your management team. These periodic reports can be used as the basis for your management meetings, as well as being useful for performance reviews.
Some fleets have found that their drivers become more engaged in improving their own driving behaviour when they’re given access to their own performance metrics. You could decide to send each driver a summary of their serious speeding infractions, or their safe driving indicators (e.g. seat belt usage, harsh acceleration, braking and cornering, excessive speeding), so that they can actively work to improve these elements.
Track your trends
Trend analysis is a great way to notice changes over time so that you can understand the impact of any events or optimisations that you make. It’s also useful to help you identify outliers that require attention - whether that’s vehicles that are achieving lower fuel efficiency and may require maintenance or are reaching the end of their service life, or a driver that isn’t achieving the same productivity as the rest of the team.
It will also allow you to track your fleet’s overall performance over time - are seasonal fluctuations impacting your fleet’s productivity? Are you underutilising the fleet on certain days of the week and maxing it out on others? These are all questions that can be answered with trend analysis.
Benchmark your fleet’s performance
While it’s useful to track your fleet’s performance over time, and to compare drivers and vehicles against one another, fleets can unlock even greater improvement opportunities by benchmarking their core metrics against other fleets with similar duty profiles.
The best telematics systems will allow you to see how you are performing compared to industry benchmarks, as well as the “best in class”.
Two key examples are fuel economy and driver safety. While you may have a good idea of your best and poorest performers in these areas, and can track improvements in these metrics over time, how do you know where to set your goals? Without benchmarking, your targets may not be sufficiently aspirational and may lack the confidence to push your team to reach tougher goals. But when you and your team know that other fleets like yours have done it, it can inspire everyone to work that bit harder.
Realise the true power of your fleet management system
Your telematics system is a powerful tool that can help you to make smarter, more confident decisions to optimise your fleet and make it safer and more sustainable.
But for this to happen, the pertinent data needs to be immediately available, and tailored to answer your specific questions. Otherwise, you’ll find that you’re wasting hours, trawling through countless exported Excel sheets and trying to find value in the template dashboards and reports.
Green Steps has helped diverse fleets to use their data to obtain valuable insights, helping them to decarbonise operations, become safer, and more productive. If you'd like to join them...
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