Eight ways telematics boosts your fleet management

Eight ways telematics boosts your fleet management

Your vehicles produce a huge amount of valuable data every day. The key to successfully managing your fleet and running a highly productive, cost-efficient, safe and well maintained fleet lies in using that data for better visibility of your drivers and vehicles to ensure they are performing at their best.

Telematics captures key data and combines it to provide powerful insights about your fleet that equips your business with the right tools and confidence to make better, more informed, data-based fleet management decisions.

EROAD’s award-winning telematics solution, which has been developed in consultation with our customers, provides you with the right tools, big data and insights to enhance the performance of your fleet. At the same time, it helps create a ‘safety-first’ culture and drives further efficiencies across your business – all on one platform.

Here’s eight ways telematics enhances your fleet management

1. Telematics improves your fleet’s productivity and efficiency

A productive fleet is a high-performing fleet – and that can only be achieved with great data.

A key benefit of EROAD’s telematics platform is its ability to help businesses identify areas where further efficiencies – both cost-savings and performance enhancements – can be made to ensure your fleet’s achieving optimal productivity.

EROAD can help optimise your fleet’s productivity and efficiency.

  • Verifying activity and routes
  • Monitoring stops made and time at customer sites
  • Identifying the most efficient routes
  • Improving dispatch and provide more accurate ETAs
  • Eliminating time wasted tracking down vehicles
  • Identifying under-performing assets and vehicles
  • Monitoring fuel usage and identify areas where fuel is being wasted by excess idling, unsafe driver behaviour, unmaintained vehicles
  • Monitoring on-road driver behaviour and provide feedback and coaching, when needed
  • Encouraging good driving behaviour
  • Identifying instances of unproductive idling, erratic driving behaviour such as speed, harsh braking or acceleration and cornering
  • Capturing defects on the spot so they can be quickly repaired
  • Automating service and maintenance scheduling
  • Geofencing specific sites or areas so you have complete visibility of what your assets are doing at a specific site as well as data on arrival times, time spent on site, distance driven and whether auxiliary equipment was used
  • Helping provide performance proof to save on insurance costs
  • Tracking your assets so you know where they are at all times to prevent theft or unauthorised use
  • Helping reduce office admin and paperwork

Having complete visibility of your fleet with EROAD allows you to better allocate resources, optimise routes and plan schedules more accurately at the same time as lifting the bar when it comes to providing a high standard of customer service. It can also bring costs down by saving on fuel, brakes, lowering maintenance costs and, ultimately, reducing the risk of accidents.

An EROAD study found that our customers improved their fuel efficiency by an average of 6% after just one year.

*EROAD Red Paper – ‘Take a fresh look at your fleet’s fuel usage to deliver big savings and sustainability’

2. EROAD nurtures a solid safety culture

The safe operation of your vehicles is a direct reflection of a well-managed, productive fleet.

EROAD’s award-winning fleet management solution puts safety at the forefront. It helps improve your safety management practices by monitoring every aspect of your driver’s, vehicle’s and equipment’s performance so you can address issues quickly and also nurture a strong safety culture.

EROAD can help you comply with site-specific rules, speed limits, vehicle standards and driver hours to prevent fatigue.

Driver performance/Speed
EROAD enables you to identify which driver is in a vehicle and provides two-way messaging and real-time in-cab feedback and coaching to help maintain good driving habits. It also monitors everything from speed, seatbelt use, harsh braking, cornering or acceleration. 

EROAD’s Share provides you with the ability to share vehicle activity and driver behaviour reports with sub-contractors and other businesses up and down your supply chain, so you have visibility of their vehicles to ensure they are adhering to same high standards you expect from your own drivers.

Vehicle health and safety

EROAD Inspect gives your drivers the ability to proactively track vehicle defects –  easily carrying out pre and post-trip vehicle inspections using EROAD’s app or the in-vehicle Ehubo2 device to record the actions required.

EROAD’s Service Module also allows you to schedule regular service and maintenance on your vehicles to ensure your fleet is kept in top condition. This ensures you have a solid track record for your compliance and enhances your productivity at the same time as minimising unexpected maintenance costs.

Driver fatigue

EROAD helps manage driver fatigue by monitoring the distance and time a vehicle has been running. EROAD Day logbook simplifies fatigue management by enabling drivers to capture work and rest hours via a smartphone or tablet. The back office can use the investigative tools on the MyEROAD web portal to examine the driver’s workday, enabling easier compliance and reporting.

Mass to load constraints

MyEROAD gives schedulers a single view of current and scheduled jobs combined with full vehicle details, through our Partner Gateway and integration with key job management platforms like ICOS live and MyTrucking.

Driver accountability is shown to have a very real impact on speed and road safety.

An EROAD study found that vehicles where the driver was logged in had 50% less speed events than vehicles with no identified driver.

Source: EROAD’s ‘The Power of Accountability’ Red Paper

In addition, Organisations that pay consistent attention to EROAD’s driver behaviour analytics have 38% fewer speeding events than organisations that don’t view them at all.

EROAD Red Paper – ‘Take a fresh look at your fleet’s fuel usage to deliver big savings and sustainability’

 

“We now have the same level of visibility across our owner driver fleet as we do of our company fleet and can now better manage all their compliance. We thought we were good and now, with EROAD Share across the fleet, we know we are good.”

Barry Raymond,
CEO, Freightlines

3. EROAD enhances driver performance

Your drivers hold a significant amount of responsibility for the safe and optimal operation of your vehicles. Accidents, traffic violations and other risky driver behaviours cost your business in a number of ways – reputational, financially, operationally and even legally.

EROAD GPS vehicle tracking solutions provide visibility of your drivers and their on-road performance. It increases accountability, facilitates better driving choices at the same time as allowing you to reinforce and reward good driving habits. In effect, it helps nurture safer driving by encouraging positive behavioural change.

It achieves this by bridging the gap between after-the-event management reporting and in-cab, behind-the-wheel influence on driver behaviour.

EROAD’s Leaderboard provides you with an inside view of your fleet based on key driver metrics, enabling you to set up effective driver training and reward programmes. It also helps reward great driving by using gamification to encourage proactive driver improvement with a bit of healthy competition by being able to benchmark your drivers and compare them to the EROAD wider community of 100,000+ vehicles.

EROAD’s Ehubo2 supports drivers with data and live in-cab notifications on speeding, seatbelt use, harsh braking, cornering and sharp acceleration so they can make safer decisions while they’re on the road.  It also allows for two-way messaging so you can stay in touch with your drivers while they’re out on the road.

EROAD Day Logbook helps you keep track of your driver’s hours and also lowers the risk of accidental non-compliance with fatigue and rest time rules.

Ensuring your drivers are safe on the road can also provide other benefits to your business such as reduced fuel and maintenance costs, less vehicle downtime, reduced fines and penalties, happier drivers and customers!

Installing EROAD in your vehicles may also help reduce your insurance premiums and excess if you can show you are in the top 25% of drivers on EROAD’s Leaderboard.

With EROAD Share , you can also get the same visibility of your contractor and sub-contractor fleets as you have of your own to coordinate resources, simplify dispatch and job management and deliver a better service to your customers.

EROAD has found that organisations that pay consistent attention to EROAD’s driver behaviour analytics have 38% fewer speeding events than organisations that don’t view them at all.

EROAD study, June 2016

Driver accountability has a very real impact on speed and road safety.

An EROAD study found that vehicles where the driver was logged in had 50% less speed events than vehicles with no identified driver.

EROAD study, June 2016

4. EROAD ensures proactive service and maintenance scheduling

With fleet-based businesses, maintenance costs can hit hard, especially when they are unexpected. Vehicle defects can also cause costly delays or vehicle down-time.

EROAD’s Service and Inspect features gives you the ability to track and stay on top of vehicle issues easily to pre-empt problems so they can be rectified quickly before they become expensive issues.

Better maintenance can also assist in reducing idle times as well as improve fuel efficiency. You save time and manage costs – including reduced overtime caused by unexpected breakdowns and repairs – while operating your entire fleet more efficiently.

EROAD also takes the guesswork out of when you need to re-torque wheels after a tyre change.  EROAD’s re-torque alerts uses distance travelled from our highly accurate in-cab unit the Ehubo2 to ensure your drivers know exactly when the wheel nuts should be re-checked for correct torque.

5. EROAD enhances customer service and satisfaction levels

In today’s digitally-charged, data-driven world, customer expectations of a fast, efficient and transparent service (within the boundaries of the law) are now expected from all companies.

EROAD can give you the right tools to ensure your fleet can deliver consistently to your service levels, at the same time as not breaking the law.

EROAD’s GPS vehicle monitoring provides visibility of your fleet, and that of your contractors, so you can schedule jobs effectively based on the location of each vehicle in your fleet. It monitors and gathers vital data on when they left, arrived at specific sites, how long they spent on site, how far they travelled and when auxiliary equipment was used.

You can also monitor what jobs were completed, which driver was in the vehicle and for how long and make route adjustments, if needed. This allows you to schedule jobs effectively based on the location of each vehicle in your fleet. At the same time, you can use the ETA tool on the Fleet Map to keep clients informed of estimated arrival times, building trust and customer satisfaction along the way.

6. EROAD automates your RUC compliance and RUCOR rebates

Not only does EROAD help optimise your operations, it automates the RUC compliance process, saving time and money.

EROAD’s platform allows you to automatically top up RUC as you go and it also accurately measures all off-road travel to maximise your RUCOR rebates at the same time as automating the claim process.

This cuts down significant admin time, visits to the Post Office, the risk of accidental non-compliance and also helps you claim more off-road refunds, faster.

What’s more, you can automatically purchase RUC in legally minimum amounts so that you can keep more cash running your business – rather than sitting on the windscreen.

EROAD also helps maximise your off-road RUC (RUCOR) claims by accurately recording every mile your fleet travels off-road. This means you can increase the amount of RUCOR dollars your business is entitled to, all at the touch of a button! It takes the hassle and guess work out of the whole process.

Automating the entire RUCOR process not only puts more money back in to your business, it saves significant admin time as it eliminates the need to document all off-road travel and manually complete refund forms. EROAD does it all for you!

Not only does it save significant time on admin, it can help maximise your off-road refunds which may help improve your cash flow.

7. Improve work efficiency with Geofences

EROAD can automatically monitor or geofence your off-road travel for your RUC rebates and also accurately monitor when your vehicles and equipment are at specific work sites.

In these cases, EROAD’s smart telematics software allows you to create a temporary ‘geofence’ or ‘buffer’ zone around that area in order that may not typically be deemed an ‘off-road’ area – such as a construction site immediately adjacent or on a public road – to deem it a temporary ‘off-road’ work area.

You can also geofence specific depots or customer sites so you can see when your vehicles arrived, how long they were there and who was in the vehicle at the time to maximise your efficiency and customer service levels.

With Geofence Alerts, you can also send location-specific information or site safety rules straight to the in-cab Ehubo device to enhance driver communication and compliance.

8. EROAD minimises paperwork

EROAD helps you ditch paper-based driver logbooks, job management, vehicle inspection checklists and RUC labels by digitising all of these essential tasks.

You can save significant time, money and admin for back office staff and drivers, whilst also ensuring no paperwork gets lost along the way.

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