How Vehicle Tracking Can Make You a Better Fleet Manager

Being a fleet manager means having a wide range of functions and a wealth of responsibilities. It’s often very hard to stay focused, organized, and on top of everything when handling logistics and customer relations, financing, maintenance, telematics, driver management, and the many other tasks that fall under the fleet manager’s duties. In some small companies, the same person running the business is also managing the fleet, making the job even more challenging.

Luckily, you are not on your own, and there are software solutions that can help! The fleet management industry has made great strides in its ability to track and evaluate the performance and logistics of fleets through GPS tracking devices and software. A complete fleet management software solution won’t stop at telling you the location of your vehicles. This technology can also help with route scheduling, maintenance, driver behavior, and more. Here are four benefits of vehicle tracking systems that can help you get on the road to becoming a better fleet manager.

1. You can easily schedule and dispatch vehicles with a fleet tracking and management system.

One of the main responsibilities of a fleet manager is the scheduling and dispatching of vehicles. This includes planning the most efficient routes for drivers in order to meet customer demand without going above the speed limit.

Tracking vehicles allows you to optimize routes and improve logistics for your customers, whether you’re planning ahead or dealing with an emergency. A crucial trait for fleet managers is the ability to adapt. Let’s say a driver is about to encounter road construction or heavy traffic from an accident. By being able to see where a driver is at all times with GPS vehicle tracking, you can easily reroute them to the next best optimized route. This can be a lifesaver when it comes to meeting delivery requirements for a customer. You’ll always have a real-time indication of whether a driver is on time or running late, so you’ll be able to adjust accordingly and notify the customer of any potential changes.

When you can set drivers on the most efficient route with ease, it becomes possible to complete more deliveries or jobs in a day, and that can have a major impact on your bottom line. Look for a fleet management software solution with dispatch capabilities to help automate the process.

2. You can evaluate and increase your fleet drivers’ productivity.

Part of being a good fleet manager is making sure the productivity of your fleet is high and always improving. A vehicle tracking system that includes driver identification can help you evaluate your drivers for productivity. That makes it easy to distinguish between who is working hard and getting the job done, and who might be spending extra time chatting at a customer location or taking long personal breaks. Then you can have conversations with employees who need a little push, or you can reward the ones who are doing well to encourage great performance. Vehicle tracking solutions may as well be called business productivity solutions!

3. You can make sure your fleet is safe.

Driver safety is another huge responsibility tasked to fleet managers. A vehicle tracking system with maintenance tracking capabilities can monitor the performance and service history of all vehicles to ensure they get serviced regularly. The ideal system will enable you to set up alerts that remind you when vehicles need service, and keeping your fleet running in tip-top shape makes it safer for the drivers. If something does go wrong while out on a job, some vehicle tracking programs can alert the driver immediately to the problem or allow the fleet manager to find a location stocked with the needed repair parts and reroute your driver there.

Vehicle tracking can also provide you with data such as the speeds of your drivers and driving patterns such as swerving. That way, you instantly know when your company is not being well represented by a driver out on the road. Vehicle tracking oftentimes results in companies seeing little to no speeding tickets, and more importantly, fewer accidents.

4. You can make decisions about when it’s profitable to purchase new fleet vehicles.

Fleet managers should always be goal and metric oriented, and tracking vehicles can provide excellent insights into all areas of your fleet operations. It allows you to hold yourself accountable by analyzing areas for improvement and your progress. As a fleet manager, you are a decision maker when it comes to keeping the operating costs of your fleet within a certain budget or even reducing it. One of the biggest costs of running a fleet are the vehicles themselves. Tracking vehicles enables you to easily gather data to weigh the costs of maintaining an older vehicle that may require more servicing versus purchasing a new one to replace it.

Innovate your approach to fleet management with GPS vehicle tracking

Vehicle tracking is beneficial in all aspects of a fleet manager’s job from managing finances, optimizing logistics, and providing better customer service to increasing productivity, time management, and analyzing goals and metrics. Using a vehicle tracking system is an innovative approach to fleet management, and it’s one that every fleet manager should use to manage their fleet in the most efficient way possible. With fleet data at your fingertips, you’ll get new insights into your business, and it’ll be easy to see where improvements can be made.