Jasmine Birtles
Your money-making expert. Financial journalist, TV and radio personality.
Optimizing your fleet is a much-needed practice for any business responsible for vehicles and their drivers on the road. Thankfully, there’s a lot of modern technology and innovation available that makes the optimization process much easier.
A lot of businesses with large fleets take advantage of telematics. One study found that out of the US respondents, 93% of fleets with 50+ vehicles employed the use of telematics products in their fleet management strategy.
To help keep your fleet running smoothly and with as few hiccups as possible, implementing modern solutions is critical. There’s so much technology widely available at our fingertips that makes operating a fleet in 2023, a lot easier than it once was.
In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of using technology for fleet optimization and the intelligent solutions currently available to take advantage of. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll have knowledge of all the relevant tools to add to your fleet management toolkit.
What intelligent solutions are worth implementing within your fleet management practices this year? Embracing technology and innovation within your fleet services is incredibly beneficial, much of which will be discussed further on in this article.
Let’s first take a look at some effective solutions within technology that are worth investing in for your fleet management.
Battery software has become very effective within many fleet vehicles, helping improve the performance of your fleet for the better.
Embedded into the vehicle and using BMS algorithms, alongside a powerful cloud platform, fleet managers are able to gain access to insightful data. With Elysia battery intelligence, fleet operators and battery asset finances get the data they need to manage, optimize, and enhance battery performance.
This in turn, helps improve vehicle performance, which of course is beneficial for business finances and overall ROI on the company vehicles themselves.
This unique software is helping fleet management of all sizes, improve battery potential in both power and range, while also providing OEMs and EV fleet operators with real-time monitoring.
Some of the most important fleet data relates to the performance and current maintenance of your fleet vehicles.
Fleetio offers a number of effective solutions that help manage asset lifecycles and automate fleet operations with the utmost efficiency. A fleet vehicle checklist template for inspections is highly beneficial to monitor the performance of your vehicles.
It allows your fleet drivers to feedback on any defects, faults, or issues they’ve spotted when driving the vehicle to and from their required checkpoints.
These free vehicle inspection forms are easy for drivers to use and for fleet managers to review and highlight where investigations need to be made for the maintenance team. It’s also helpful to have in place for compliance, such as FMCSA 396.11.a.1 of the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations.
Fleetio is a useful platform to utilize in the broadened sense as it helps with all aspects of your fleet’s maintenance. For growing fleets, this is often a much-needed tool for fleet managers to stay on top of each and every vehicle.
A major change within fleet vehicles is the growing number of EVs being used. It’s a technological advancement that’s only going to become more prominent as the need for cleaner fuel is more sought-after.
The demand for electric cars is certainly apparent, with sales expected to leap 35% this year according to the IEA’s annual Global Electric Vehicle Outlook.
CloudMade is one of the newer technologies, offering SaaS predictions for fleet management software.
Fuel efficiency is important, which is a feature that this software has in the form of driver scoring. Using fleet data, fleet managers are able to identify and uncover hidden inefficiencies of fuel spending that are caused by poor driving.
Not only that but it helps optimize EV usage, as well as using AI for predictive maintenance of vehicles. For your business, maximizing your financial investments is key, which is why this type of predictive maintenance technology is useful for helping fleet management save money in the future.
Being able to keep a close eye on your drivers at all times is important when it comes to fleet management. However, for your drivers, it’s also important you’re looking after their safety and ensuring any accidents that do occur, are captured.
In many cases, accidents are preventable, especially if the driver within your fleet has picked up habits that contribute to dangerous driving.
With Camera Matics, you are able to take advantage of AI dash cams. Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology that’s being used across many industries and many tools used within business.
Dashcams are great for providing visual evidence during accidents that your drivers are or are not responsible for. Therefore helping deliver accountability to the right party. As a company, you provide as much training as possible. It’s up to the driver on how they perform when on the road.
One of the benefits of Camera Matics is that the AI dash cams are also able to provide training through actual life incidents to help better the driver’s habits moving forward. We expect that AI will have a much wider impact on fleet management services in the future.
In the field of telematics, there are plenty of tools and innovative practices developing for modern fleets to make use of.
Telematics, which is the method of monitoring vehicles with GPS technology and on-board diagnostics to plot the asset’s movement , has helped many within fleet management.
What benefits does technology serve for fleet optimization? Here are just a few reasons why you should be deep-diving into this modern technology right now.
With so many drivers and their assets moving all at once, it is hard to pinpoint and keep track of everyone all at once. Old-fashioned systems would rely on GPS alone to track drivers and it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that telematics would first crop up on the scene.
A lack of visibility creates a whole host of problems for fleet managers including:
With today’s telematics technology available, managers get full visibility and management of their entire fleet through one screen or one software in particular.
For any manager or fleet management team, being able to streamline their software usage helps to improve productivity levels, cuts down financial resources, and aids fleet performance.
Thanks to telematics and the advancement of technology in general, monitoring the movements of your drivers in real time has never been easier.
With real-time monitoring being used in telematics, you’ve got a Big Brother eye on all of your drivers and where they are in the world. Whether they’re on the move, stopped off at services, or going somewhere they shouldn’t be during working hours, you’ll see it as a fleet manager.
It helps improve productivity levels but may also provide credible evidence when you need to pull up certain drivers on their work habits.
Being able to improve driver safety is essential as a fleet manager and ensuring driver accountability is established is also key.
According to one statistic, 57% of fleet managers who use telematics and GPS found effective results in improving fleet safety and operations.
With such technology in place, not only are you able to mitigate the risks that come when your drivers are on the road but you make certain everything has been done by the business to improve safety practices.
To some degree, your drivers are responsible for maintaining safety while driving, and using this type of technology helps reinforce that accountability.
Improving fuel efficiency and maintenance are two helpful benefits that come with intelligent solutions being implemented.
With a critical eye on how businesses improve their environmental efforts, improving fuel efficiency not only saves money but gives your reputation a green boost too.
Innovative technologies used will be able to advise your fleet management team on how to cut down on idling, eco-efficient route mapping, and maintenance of all vehicles.
For modern fleets in 2023, intelligent solutions are well worth embracing. There are plenty of great benefits that come with using such technology and it’s technology that’s only becoming more powerful and intuitive with the use of AI.
Start looking at how these tools and software are useful for your fleet management services, regardless of the fleet’s size. As your fleet grows, so too does the responsibility and pressure for performance. With this type of technology and innovation, your fleet will really thrive in 2023.
Disclaimer: MoneyMagpie is not a licensed financial advisor and therefore information found here including opinions, commentary, suggestions or strategies are for informational, entertainment or educational purposes only. This should not be considered as financial advice. Anyone thinking of investing should conduct their own due diligence.