Fleet Management
Getting a Bird’s Eye View Into Your Entire Fleet Operations
With a fleet management dashboard, key fleet and driver performance indicators are proactively tracked and presented to you for immediate review, regardless of your company size.
Martin Demers
Waste fleet operations are all about maximum efficiencies. To improve efficiencies, you need a detailed understanding of what’s going on. This usually means hours spent poring over countless reports and data to identify trends and anomalies for better decision making. Often, the process is simply too time-consuming to undertake effectively, so the required monitoring and analysis is not done. While big companies have the resources to conduct broad-based data gathering, research and analysis, smaller companies typically don’t.
Digital dashboards—once the domain of Fortune 500 firms—can now provide you with a single interface into a variety of operations information specific to your business requirements. These dashboards are increasingly becoming a part of waste fleet management solutions and are typically designed to track key fleet and driver performance indicators (KPIs) to flag any potential problem areas.
With a fleet management dashboard, KPIs are proactively tracked and presented to you for immediate review, regardless of your company size. You no longer have to pull the data from multiple sources, analyze it and extrapolate key findings—a fleet management dashboard can easily track and distil the information you need and display it in real-time.
How it Works
Fleet management dashboards provide you with a single-view interface into your fleet operations and performance. A dashboard and related reporting capabilities let you check on fleet and driver activity and trends at a glance. You can view everything from weekly or monthly high-level trends, or track detailed and individual performance data.
You can set thresholds that are positive, cautionary or negative to automatically highlight key results. All your critical information is provided on a single screen for quick and easy monitoring—typically, green is an acceptable threshold, yellow is cautionary and red is negative. From excess speeding to customer stop times to idle times—you can track virtually every aspect of daily fleet and driver activity to understand the problems and respond effectively.
For example, if your goal is to shave 30 minutes from every route per day, you no longer need to follow up information from manual or other disparate sources. You can now set the dashboard to proactively track time-sensitive KPIs to flag problem areas and let you to address these toward achieving your time reduction goal.
Reporting Components
A dashboard typically works seamlessly with reporting software to monitor performance metrics that are important to your business. These could be:
Driver related: excess speeds, hard braking, break times, delayed starts, idle times
Customer related: service times, average yards per lift, average lbs per yards
Route related: drive time between stops, time to first stop, number of stops
Reporting capabilities should include:
Fleet reports that allow you to evaluate overall operational efficiency:
Driver activity
Driver performance
Driver scoring
Fuel consumption
Fleet performance
Vehicle reports that allow you to monitor vehicle usage:
Accidents
Accident graph
Alarms
Fuel tax
Vehicle usage
A Dashboard Can Improve Your Business
The benefits of a fleet management dashboard are wide-ranging:
You have a vastly improved ability to make decisions—a visual presentation of performance measures lets you identify trends in driver behaviour, track vehicles and service performance, and measure efficiencies.
You can better align your organization—by working from a universal set of metrics and a single view into these, all internal functions can track organizational goals and performance.
You increase operational efficiencies—you save time over running multiple reports, gain total visibility into all information, better manage routes and drivers, and can respond faster to customer service issues.
You can deal with problems faster—by being able to detect and identify problem areas, you can better manage exceptions, deal with driver or vehicle issues, and ensure route efficiencies.
Dashboards can be your window into your entire fleet operations. When implementing a fleet management or reporting solution, be sure to take advantage of a dashboard component. You will be sure to see the positive impact on business intelligence and decision making.
Martin Demers is CEO of FleetMind (Montreal, QC).He is a proven C-level technology executive with more than 20 years of experience in the technology and communications sectors. Previously, he served as President and COO of Radialpoint, CEO of Interstar, and as CMO of ACE*COMM. Martin has also held a number of leadership roles at Teleglobe Foxboro and CAE where he managed large scale international projects. He has often been quoted in industry publications and is a frequent speaker at industry events. Martin can be reached at [email protected] or visit www.fleetmind.com.