How To Overcome Fleet Management Challenges By Deploying Advanced Telematics Your Network

Today's technology has allowed commercial fleet owners, smart vehicle manufacturers, and product managers to no longer rely on assumptions, gut instincts, and belief.

Instead, it has offered innumerable ways and resources to make data-driven decisions on diverse aspects from recruitment of skilled manpower to get real-time information on vehicle health, location, and more. With the deployment of the right technology, fleet owners and managers are able to take their businesses to a whole new level by understanding the true market potential, fixing operational loopholes and anticipating industry trends, and adapting to them.

And this post of our Digital Transformation In The Automotive Sector guide series, we are about to explore one such super-extensive technology that offers optimum insights, power, and liberty to fleet owners.

Say hello to Telematics.

For those of you who are new to the series, we explore diverse aspects in the automotive sector to identify and resolve everyday challenges business owners face. We have comprehensively covered several wings in our previous chapters, which we urge you to check them out.

And for your regular readers, we assure you this post is going to be equally interesting and educational.

Let's get started.

But What Is Telematics?

So, in all our previous chapters and this one, we've been consistently mentioning telematics, its challenges, and its solutions.

But what does the technology do?

What is it all about and is it really the black box of a vehicle?

Well, let's understand the basics first.

Telematics is a combination of two words – telecommunication and informatics. While telecommunication is about cables, wires, hardware devices, and the more recent cloud, informatics is all about data, data processing, insights, visualization, artificial intelligence, and more.

Telematics refers to the deployment of ideal hardware devices (an ecosystem or standalone equipment) and connecting them to a communication medium. Once installed in a fleet or a vehicle, the system generates data on assigned parameters and consistently transmits it for backend systems to process and generate insights.

To give you a brief idea of the features of telematics, it offers comprehensive insights on the following:

• speed of the vehicle
• The precise location of the vehicle
• idling time
• harsh acceleration
• cornering
• braking
• fuel consumption
• engine and components health
• asset and trailer tracking
• safety tracking
• insurance management
• vehicle-to-vehicle communication and more

In short, telematics takes care of everything a fleet manager is worried about.

So, in this post, we will delve deep into the integration of technology in your business and explore the challenges and solutions along the way.

But before that, here are some crucial numbers and statistics on telematics

Telematics In Numbers

• The global market value of telematics was close to $43.61bn in the year 2019.
• By the year 2027, this market value is anticipated to increase to $129.2bn, accelerating at a CAGR of 15.1%.
• Telematics is also recorded to reduce carbon emissions by around 75%, which is close to 36mn metric tons of carbon dioxide.
• It increases vehicle efficiency by around 15%.
• By deploying airtight telematics systems, accidents can be prevented by 25%.

Challenges Involved In Maintaining A Commercial Fleet

Maintaining a network of commercial fleets is no joke. You could own a logistics network, delivering goods and products for the supply chain, or have a fleet of on-demand transportation services. Regardless of your venture, you need to resolve the challenges that are visible and even the ones you didn't know exist. To help you get started with the challenges, we have compiled a list of the most common ones. Let's explore them individually.

Monitoring Fleet Network

Vehicles in a fleet network are all over the place. They are scheduled to reach all possible directions and locations and without a strong tech infrastructure, a fleet manager or a business owner cannot keep track of where each of their vehicles is.

With roadways involving days of driving, managers have to be consistently informed about vehicle location, health, driver discipline, driver health, accidents and road safety, compliances, and more to ensure their delivery or transportation requirements are met.

Monitoring Driver Behaviour

As we mentioned, drivers have to be on the road for days – or sometimes weeks – across diverse terrains, weather conditions, and geographical locations. From remote, managers have to know if their drivers are in good and healthy driving conditions and that there are no road uncertainties being met.

Besides, the goodwill of drivers, managers have to monitor for driver disciplines such as speeding, cornering, braking, reckless overtaking, honking, idling, bullying, respecting regional and indigenous road laws, and more to ensure their assets and brand names are maintained intact.

Fuel Consumption Analysis

Petty cash offered to drivers for fuel and other expenses are mostly based on trust and word of mouth. Sometimes, drivers could take this situation to their advantage. With obsolete and offline tracking systems, managers cannot precisely know the fuel consumption patterns of each vehicle. This keeps the actual expenses in the dark.

Besides, managers cannot also know or detect if the engine is in good health or understand if they need to take some preemptive measures to minimize fuel consumption of their vehicles.

Traffic Management

Traffic is one of the major constraints for delayed deliveries. There could be either specific traffic patterns in regions or a sudden pile up of vehicles. Regardless of the case, a vehicle driver should be able to know in advance traffic routes and navigate through routes that are devoid of traffic. Without this, logistics or fleets will never reach on time.

Safety Issues With Traffic Management

The roads are full of probabilities and drivers should be prepared for anything. From colliding cars to animal crossings, there could be tons of situations that demand emergency assistance. Without a proper mechanism in fleets, drivers have a very tough time availing emergency services, assistance and guidance. 

Unable To Track Stolen Vehicles

The road is full of uncertainties and threats and when running a fleet of commercial vehicles, we have to understand them and be prepared for worst-case scenarios to tackle them when situations demand. One such threat on the roads is the stealing of vehicles.

When such incidents happen, managers have to know where their stolen vehicles are heading for. With vehicles carrying assets of worth, stolen vehicle details should be available to file complaints, track and retrieve them. With offline mechanisms, stolen vehicles remain gone forever.

Navigation Concerns

With drivers driving through uncharted territories and newer frontiers, it is not just factoring like weather and changing road laws that become concerns. Crucial factors like navigation and language become barriers as well. In such cases, drivers find it extremely difficult to find their way through new towns and cities to reach their preferred destination in time. If the local language is something different from what drivers speak, it further becomes problematic to find routes.

Accountable Timekeeping

For businesses that have their branches spread across the globe, managing fleets and workforce is a major concern. With time zone differences being a major factor for supervision and coordination, fleet managers cannot know when an employee is reporting to work, the progress or status updates of tasks, employee check-out times, idling hours and more. Without these, managers cannot have an authentic timekeeping log. 

No Information For Significant Key Metrics

Managerial decisions are only as effective as insights managers have with them. And resourceful insights can only be obtained when key metrics of operations are defined. Without proper definitions of parameters or metrics to track, organizations could incur additional expenses in manpower management, vehicle servicing, delayed deliveries and even depleting market credibility.

Suboptimal Driving Performance

Remember the challenge on fuel consumption we discussed some time back? Well, that is directly associated with driving performance as well. Well-maintained speeds lead to saving on fuel. And that is directly dependent on the driving abilities and the attitude of the driver.

From rash driving to not obeying local laws, driving performance has an impact on your brand reputation, the assets you deliver, and your operational expenses. The driving performance also influences the time within which assets are delivered or passengers are dropped off in their destinations.

Anonymous Location Of Your Assets

When you cannot track the location of your vehicles, what remains equally anonymous is the location of the assets you're delivering as well. Companies partner with logistics service providers for their credibility, operational standards, and fulfilled promises. And these cannot be claimed or met if you have the basic functionality of tracking or monitoring your assets' location and other allied details.

Complex Billing

The process of billing and raising invoices is a recurring affair and every single time, they have to be modified for specific particulars as well. With obsolete systems, preparing to the bill is a concern. But the more complex ones are those on maintaining archives of previous bills and invoices, retrieval for reference purposes, and looking at discrepancies. When your network is big and you have diverse clients with equally diverse vehicles, this becomes all the more crucial.

Solutions To These Challenges

All these are complex concerns we discussed. But the solution to them is comparatively simple – digital transformation. With an array of tech devices and software solutions, you can tackle and optimize your network for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. So, let's explore the solutions.

Connected Cars

We dedicated an entire chapter on connected car technology and you can check it out here for super-extensive resources and information. To give you an idea, however, understand that a connected car is all about equipping your vehicle with computers or systems with computational abilities.

They can be installed in your vehicles and they can track and report parameters you assign to. From live locations to vehicle health, they can transmit the most accurate and real-time data to your system. Not just that, you can also trigger actions from the remote through connected car technology.

Fleet Management

Your entire network of fleets can be monitored through telematics systems. You can supervise individual vehicles from remote, give instructions, receive information, and do more with this tech incorporation. Apart from tackling operational constraints, you can also take care of organizational restraints like resource allocation, rostering, payroll management, and more with insights from this.

Insurance Telematics

Telematics plays a major role in insurance companies. Thanks to the details on driver behaviour, discipline, vehicle health, fuel consumption, and more telematics offers, insurance companies use this data to determine risks and modify the pricing of their insurance premiums.

So, for a driver with a good driving record, the insurance premium would be less as they are less likely to attract troubles associated with driving. And for those with spots in their driving career, insurance premiums would be more.

Remote Vehicle Diagnostics

When a vehicle stops abruptly in the middle of nowhere, telematics systems can do two things:

• identify and fix concerns from remote
• allow fleet managers to call for service personnel in the vicinity from remote

But this is the last line of defence mechanism telematics offers. With its artificial intelligence algorithms, telematics can accurately predict when components or parts are most likely to malfunction and trigger service requests accordingly. This completely eliminates the chances of vehicles breaking down on roads.

GPS Vehicle Tracking

With GPS tracking devices, fleet managers or even clients and stakeholders can get real-time information on the location of their vehicles. With an app and a tracking ID, the location could be monitored seamlessly. Besides, GPS functionalities can also help drivers navigate new routes and destinations with ease, eliminating dependencies to seek local assistance.

Live Speed Tracking

Not just the location of vehicles, even the speed at which they are being accelerated can be tracked from the remote. A fleet manager would know if a driver is over speeding and warn them or understand instantly why a vehicle is moving at a speed lower than what is designated. With this pattern, driving discipline can be detected for individual drivers and vehicles for added insights.

Geofencing

Another layer to the vehicle tracking facility is the geofencing concept. With this, fleet managers can assign a virtual fence around a destination and route to vehicles and drivers. Whenever a driver attempts to take a different route or move out of the virtual boundary, notifications are sent to stakeholders. This is of immense help when vehicles are stolen.

ESIM

For telematics to consistently monitor, generate and transmit data, they need to be constantly connected to a cellular network. ESIM resolves this challenge by offering 4G wireless connectivity to vehicles for this purpose.

Data Analytics

Data analytics is the backbone of all processes involved. It is what gives stakeholders information. Without data analytics, data on location will just be random coordinates or codes that are incomprehensible to laymen. This is what stores, analyses, processes, finds patterns, visualizes, and does more on diverse datasets and offers information in a form that is workable by stakeholders. Data analytics is also responsible for predictive maintenance and advanced autonomous decisions.

Connectivity

Road accidents are other uncertainties drivers face on a daily basis. And one of the major causes of accidents is distraction due to the usage of phones. Be it calls or messages, drivers tend to look at a smartphone and operate it while driving, compromising on road safety. That's why connectivity solutions offer features that can mirror phones to the vehicle's interface systems on the dashboard to let drivers dictate commands without taking their hands off the wheel.

Case Study

Spedion

Making use of the technology and offering consumers a convenient way to experience the awesomeness of it is the app called Spedion. Available for Android users on the Google Play store, Spedion offers free low-cost telematics features to its drivers and fleet managers.

Like a good telematics system, that app provides tracking technology of vehicles, drivers and the fleet as a whole. Adding another layer, the app also profiles diverse aspects of data generated on driver discipline, speed, braking, acceleration, estimated fuel consumption, vehicle diagnostics, cornering, and more.

Besides these features, fleet managers can also access and retrieve historic data on all these profiles as well. This keeps paperwork at bay and paves the way for a workforce that is more honest and authentic.

One of the standout features of Spedion is that it allows in-app messaging or broadcasting services to all drivers or networks. With this, a driver in a particular route experiencing bad road or weather conditions can share this detail with anyone in the network through one message. This can alert every other driver in the network and one doesn't even have to know another driver's phone number to notify. Some of the other comprehensive features offered by the app include:

• a full-fledged order processing system
• fund management modules
• task assigning systems with tracking mechanisms
• vehicle and driver comparison
• elapsed driving time of fleets and more

The Future Of Telematics

Like every other tech concept out there, the future of telematics is promising as well. Several researchers and tech experts believe that the future of telematics is all about making more use of the data to come up with more crucial insights for purposes beyond driving and fleet management systems.

One aspect of this is the integration of video into the ecosystem, allowing fleet managers to have the footage of the driving discipline of drivers. For instance, if a driver consistently reasons his cornering or braking on another vehicle that crossed by, video information from telematics can actually show whose fault it was instantly.

Besides this, telematics will also evolve into a complete business management solution in the future with its advanced deep learning modules.

From our observation, we are also looking at remote vehicle-to-vehicle interaction for added data transmission and processing.

Wrapping Up

So, this is what telematics is about – convenience, real-time insights, and authority. With telematics, fleet managers can have a simplified work-life and pave the way for a more secure and safe means to operate and manage their vehicles. All they need is an airtight telematics solution.

And for that, they need veterans like us to develop custom solutions for their business. Reach out to us and discover customizable and robust telematics solutions that will take your business ahead of your time.