How Reporting Can Benefit Your Service Organization

   

  

  

         Managing all of your fleet-related activities can prove to be a difficult task. But overlooking key areas in your operations can end up costing you more than what you bargained for.

        With a GPS fleet management solution and reporting functionality, you can gain greater visibility into your fleet operations to see what’s working and what’s not.

      Reports can benefit your business in many ways. Let us take a look.

1. Maintenance Schedule Summary Report:

A maintenance schedule summary report displays summary information for all maintenance schedules for a specific vehicle or for an entire fleet. Using this report ensures that preventative maintenance is carried out consistently and on schedule. Not only that, it extends the life of your vehicles, saving you money in the long run.

2. Start/Stop Report:

With a start/stop report, you know your vehicles first movement of the day and all movement up to the vehicles last stop of the day. You can analyze a vehicle’s time spent in transit, the time spent at each stop and the number and locations of stops each day. This report can also be used as a virtual time card to validate payroll hours.

3. Idle Report:

Use an idle report to identify high idling drivers and see how much money is being spent while idling. With this report, you can view the cost of idling based on gas prices and fuel efficiency that you set for your fleet. Eliminating excessive idling will help reduce your fuel operating expenses.

4. Speed Report:

A speed report allows you to identify consistent speeding offenders by showing a vehicles speeding incidents over a defined speed threshold for a given time period. Using this report will allow you to hold your drivers responsible while reducing your liability and insurance premiums.

4 Ways To Improve Your Fleet Operations In 2014

           

             We are about to enter into a new year, it’s time to start thinking about what you’d like to improve and accomplish in the upcoming year. To help kick-start your business goals for the New Year, here are 4 ways to take your fleet operations to the next level and make 2014 your best year yet:  

Monitor Vehicle and Driver Activity: 

              It’s important to have a clear understanding of where your vehicles and drivers are throughout the day. Unfortunately, this can be hard to monitor when you can’t be in the passenger seat. By utilizing a fleet tracking solution, you can use your computer or mobile device to see where your drivers are heading and where they have been. This helps to ensure jobs are being competed on time.

Provide Your Drivers with Efficient Routes:

              If your drivers have multiple stops in a day, it’s crucial that they have the most efficient routing plan. With a fleet tracking solution, you can take all locations and stops and order them to create the shortest routes. This means your drivers can get more jobs done in a day and helps to reduce your fuel spend. You can also re-route your drivers on the fly if they get lost or struck in traffic. 

Make Driver Safety a Top Priority:

              When your employees spend most of their time on the road, you need to make sure they are driving safely. Aggressive driving not only puts your employees at risk, but the reputation of your business as well.  Fleet management technology can help you monitor aggressive driving behaviors such as speeding, harsh braking, harsh acceleration and sudden cornering. You can also use a distracted driving solution to prevent your employees from talking, texting, emailing and surfing the web while driving. 

Automate Your Maintenance Schedules: 

               When you have multiple vehicles in your fleet, keeping track of maintenance can be time-consuming and difficult. To help simplify the process and prolong the life of your vehicles, you can utilize automated maintenance schedules, logs and reports. You can view details of services performed from your computer or mobile device and receive instant alerts if needed repairs are overdue. This helps to keep your vehicles on the road and out of the shop.     

              Easy way to achieve all the above goals is by installing a GPS based Vehicle tracking system in your vehicle.

4 Ways Geofencing Technology Can Help Improve Efficiency,Security And Safety

GEO_FENCING

        

       If you have a mobile workforce, geofencing technology is a valuable tool that could be very beneficial for your business. What exactly is a geofence? It’s a virtual perimeter around a geographic area—large or small. Geofencing technology allows you to create a perimeter in any shape around job locations, cities, countries, etc. You can use alerts functionality to notify you when your vehicles enter and exit the area within the geofence.

So how can geofencing technology help your business? Let’s take a look:

1. Arrival and departure times:  Let’s say you want to know when your employees are on a job site. By creating a geofence around the site, you can set up alerts to easily monitor when your employees arrive or leave from that location. Not only that, you can monitor for unauthorized vehicle use during working hours.
2. Payroll and time management: For payroll purposes and billing accuracy, geofences come in handy. Automatic alerts can be used to notify you when your vehicles arrive and depart from a job site. This creates a virtual timecard, logging the time spent on the job. This proves to be beneficial for employees who are paid by the hour or service workers who have charge-out rates.
3. Asset protection: Your vehicles are an expensive asset so it’s important to keep your investment safe. An asset used after-hours or without permission can result in liability issues, increased insurance premiums, damaged property and expensive downtime.  Triggered alerts can be used to notify you when a vehicle or piece of equipment moves outside of a designated area. This not only provides additional security, it offers peace of mind that your investments are safe.
4. Stolen equipment: When a piece of equipment or a vehicle is moved outside of your geofence, you can trigger an alert to notify you right when this action occurs. These alerts will only notify you so while the thieves may think they are getting away with your equipment, you know their location and can alert the police, saving you a great deal of money.

Overview of vehicle tracking solution from Tranzlogix Solutions

How to Prevent Vehicle Breakdowns and Expensive Repairs With Fleet Tracking?

  

     Fleet owners won't be willing to have their fleets under shed due to some breakdowns. To improve ROI(Return On Investment) the fleets must be kept engaged as much as possible.Effective utilization of resources is very important to achieve a better ROI. To achieve this the vehicles must be properly maintained. Lack of minor initial maintenance works may lead to some major problems which may further lead to some expensive repairs. The best example is periodic oil change. The Engine oil must be periodically changed. If not so it may lead to some serious engine problem.

    The best way to avoid all such problem is to have a scheduled maintenance. To have a scheduled maintenance one must maintain a proper maintenance records. Again here comes the problem. Maintaining a record in paper is another tedious process. 

      GPS based Vehicle Tracking System gives you the solution for all the above problem.

     With a GPS fleet tracking solution and its automated maintenance scheduling functionality, you can:

• Easily create and schedule vehicle maintenance with just a few clicks of a button

• Receive alerts to your computer or mobile device when it’s time for upkeep or repairs

• Conveniently set service reminders by days, miles  and/or engine hours

• View details of services performed on any or all vehicles – all on one screen

    As a result you could properly maintain your vehicles with a minimum maintenance cost. Properly maintained vehicles will help you to achieve effective utilization which results in high return. 

Protect Your People,Property and Profitability 

Fleet Risk Management

             Managing risk is part of operating any business. It's also a smart way to lower costs and boost profitability. If you operate a fleet of vehicles, you can reduce the risks to your organisation by implementing a GPS based fleet management solution to continually monitor vehicle and driver performance gaining more control over fleet performance while helping to protect your people, assets, and bottom line.

5 Steps For Managing Fleet Risk

1.Improving Safety:

              Speeding wastes fuel, increases the risk of accidents, and can lead to other behaviours that put your drivers and vehicles at risk. According to the Bureau of Energy Efficiency of India, aggressive driving  including speeding  can lower highway fuel mileage by 33 percent and city mileage by five percent.

            To reduce speeding, you first need to know when and where your drivers are doing it. A fleet tracking system reveals this information by monitoring the speed and location of every vehicle, at all times. It also comes with customisable alert and reporting features that provide the data required to effectively coach or discipline drivers and bring them into alignment with company policies.

         For example, alerts notify you in real time when speeding incidents occur. You determine the alert criteria, such as speed thresholds, time of day, type of vehicle, etc., and the system automatically sends a text or e-mail alert when a violation occurs. Speeding reports also provide detailed and summary data on all speed-related incidents. The reports can be scheduled for automated delivery on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, allowing you to identify current violations as well as month-by-month trends in driver behaviour.

2.Limit Unnecessary Driving:

        Risk can be reduced by avoiding unnecessary driving. With a wireless fleet management system, you can reduce unnecessary driving by routing vehicles more efficiently, tracking their locations, monitoring off-hours usage. You can also use a variety of reports to monitor and manage vehicle utilisation that show

• The daily start and end location of every vehicle: With this data you can confidently allow drivers to take their vehicles home at night, knowing you can easily identify any unauthorised use.
• Vehicle usage outside of normal business hours.
•  Vehicles entering or exiting an "off-limits" area.

3.Reduce Vehicle Breakdowns:

             Poorly maintained vehicles can become increasingly unsafe to drive. With a Fleet management system, you can reduce the risks related to malfunctioning or poorly maintained vehicles in several important ways. Your Fleet management system will also provide comprehensive service records. These allow you to maintain fleet health and help extend the life of your vehicles for cost savings and safe operation.

4.Protect Against Vehicle Theft:

               Vehicle tracking system will help you to protect your vehicle from theft.It can alert you when there is any suspicious vehicle movement. It can also help to retrieve stolen vehicles by enabling you to provide police departments with a van or truck's precise location the moment you realise it's been stolen.

         Geofencing will intimate you when your vehicles move out of the predefined boundary. And if you feel that there is some unauthorised movement then you could stop the engine by cutting the fuel supply just by sending an SMS from your mobile. 

5.Protect Drivers Against False Claims:

                Drivers might be falsely accused of speeding in a school zone. A customer might complain that they didn't receive a delivery on time. Another customer might accuse a service technician of over-charging by falsifying the amount of time spent at the location. In some cases, drivers might be blamed for causing an accident they weren't even part of.GPS based vehicle tracking can help reduce these risks by providing the precise speed and location of every vehicle in your fleet.     

Top 3 Driving Mistakes A Web-Based Fleet System Can Prevent

        The trucking industry is one of the most important transportation industries in India today, hauling food, clothing, and business and consumer goods all over the country. In order to get the most out of this industry, you need to have the best drivers out on the road at all times.

        Unfortunately not all truck drivers are operating their vehicles in the safest and most efficient ways at all times, but if you were able to be sitting in the passenger seat of every truck that you have out on the road, it might help avoid the top three mistakes that most drivers make. Since you can't be in every vehicle at all times, a Vehicle tracking system can monitor trucker behavior as though you were riding along in each vehicle at all times.

Mistake #1: Speeding

        According to the National Highway Authority of India, speed is a factor in about 1 out of every 3 fatal crashes, and it is one of the leading factors that contributes to non-fatal crashes as well. These dangers are amplified when they involve a speeding semi-truck because of the size of the vehicle. There are a lot of reasons your drivers might be speeding, whether it's because they are behind schedule for a delivery, they are not paying attention, or they are trying to make the delivery faster to get home sooner, but whatever the reason, the behavior is dangerous. In addition to the risk of causing a crash, speeding can be costly because it decreases fuel efficiency and may result in speeding tickets or other fines. If drivers knew the boss was monitoring their driving behaviors, they might be less likely to speed.

Mistake #2: Unscheduled Stops

       When a driver is out on the road all alone, it can be tempting to make unscheduled stops or take detours to see something that is nearby, but not necessarily on, their routes. Even if your drivers aren't taking detours, they may be wasting time and money by driving less efficient routes by driving in high traffic areas, at rush hour, or during peak hours. Detours and inefficient routes will often put a driver behind, causing him/her to speed, drive for longer hours, or take other risks to ensure they make the delivery on time. If you don't have a Vehicle tracking system , you may not know about unscheduled stops or inefficient routes that are putting your shipments behind schedule.

Mistake #3: Inefficient Driving

         Aggressive driving tactics may be costing you extra money. Things like rapid acceleration and hard braking can reduce your gas mileage by as much as 33 percent, according to estimates by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency of India. If your business has a fleet of vehicles out on the road, monitoring drivers' behavior to ensure they are obeying the speed limit and maintaining a constant speed as much as possible can improve fuel efficiency and reduce your costs.

        Since you can't be out on the road with your drivers at all times, find out how Tranzlogix Info Solutions can help you be with every vehicle virtually, monitoring driving behavior and ensuring efficient, safe operation on every delivery.