Using telematics solutions to optimize your existing vehicle fleet.

Nathan Forster, Head of Automotive and Transportation Marketing

If you’re looking for extra capacity and haven’t considered your existing fleet, telematics can help you discover new opportunities, optimize your current assets, and save money at the same time.

All transportation and logistics organizations want to do more with less, but their traditional fleet management strategies may prevent them from reaching that goal. This is because organizations usually add more vehicles when they need to scale up—resulting in more costs for equipment, drivers, fuel, and ongoing maintenance. 

What you may not know, however, is that you probably have additional transportation capacity hidden within your current fleet. In fact, you may not even need to purchase additional vehicles to either replace an aging fleet or add new capacity. Instead, you can use telematics to identify extra capacity within your fleet.

Telematics captures important vehicle data and provides visibility across the entire fleet operation. It provides data that T&L companies can use to improve every aspect of their operations, increasing the efficiency of everything from the routes drivers take to how they drive.

Good telemetry data saves companies money, helps them be more productive, and makes the best use of their current transportation assets. It works like this:

• Using the telemetry data, companies can easily see the average performance of a vehicle in their fleets, including miles driven, destinations reached, and so forth.
• Organizations can use that data to easily identify trends, address problems, and determine available capacity.
• This “found capacity” can then be utilized or, if necessary, the organization can reduce fleet size to save on depreciation, maintenance and other costs.

Using telematics technologies, T&L companies can identify daily workflow patterns, automate routines, make accurate predictions, and recommend next actions.

Here are three more ways telematics helps you optimize your current fleet:

• Telematics provides vehicle utilization data, which helps you determine how often a vehicle is being used and by whom. You can use this information to easily determine replacement or even rightsizing strategies.
• Using telematics, you can benchmark vehicle health against similar companies with similar equipment. This will help you identify areas of improvement and also tell you what you’re doing well.
• Finally, fleet managers can use telematics to positively influence driver behaviors, minimize long-term equipment damage, reduce operational costs (i.e., fuel consumption), and ultimately extend the maintenance intervals of tires, brakes, and other vehicle parts.