The logistics and transportation Vehicle sector is changing rather fast, so there’s a need to have efficient fleet management. With one, you can optimize performance and productivity, reduce overhead costs, operate within budget, and stay competitive.
However, you may want to embrace technology and, most likely, the GPS vehicle trackers, or fuel cards, to achieve such results. Have you heard of these systems or seen other organizations use them?
Technically, GPS vehicle trackers are indispensable tools businesses can use to manage their fleet effectively. They work by allowing real-time tracking of vehicles to ultimately reduce the risks of theft, high fuel consumption, and accidents due to poor driving habits.
In 2023, the market size for GPS tracking devices stands at $3.1 billion and will reach $5.1 billion in the next five years, growing at 13.1% CAGR. This growth is attributed to the increasing popularity of IoT and cloud computing, increased usage of commercial vehicles, and, most importantly, their extensive features that promote efficiency in a fleet.
If you haven’t installed a GPS vehicle tracker in your business, here are five ways an effective one can improve your efficiency that’ll probably pique your interest.
What are GPS Vehicle Trackers?
Before unveiling the five ways a GPS vehicle tracker can benefit your fleet management, understand what GPS trackers are.
Simply put, GPS vehicle trackers like RAM Tracking are devices that operate on systems that monitor the location and activities of a fleet at any time. The tracking device is fitted in the cars and relies on satellite technology. Through this, the fleet manager can track the movement of vehicles in real-time and subsequently make data-driven decisions that enhance safety, low operation costs, and improve efficiency.
Moreover, these real-time insights and data help meet customer expectations by ensuring on-time delivery and convenient routes. Not to mention that this decreases fuel expenses directly, so you save more.
Now, let’s look at the various ways to improve your fleet efficiency using GPS vehicle trackers.
5 Ways GPS Vehicle Tracking Can Improve Your Fleet Efficiency
In the modern era, exploring how trackers can promote fleet management is necessary for every organization wanting to remain competitive in the fast-paced transportation sector.
Here are five ways you can benefit by adding a vehicle tracker to your fleet management.
1. Reducing Fuel Expenses
Did you know that fuel is the second most expensive expense a company spends on transportation? That’s to say, if you can reduce your fleet’s fuel consumption, you will ultimately save more and focus the funds on other integral practices. Other than the unavoidable causes such as price hiccups, there are other causes of the high fuel consumption that can be identified with a vehicle tracker.
Things like idling are common causes of high fuel expenses. Research by the Environmental Defense Fund depicts that a single vehicle can waste ⅕ gallon of fuel when idle for an hour. Multiply that with the size of your fleet and determine how the fuel costs can increase in just an hour of idling.
Another cause of high fuel costs is aggressive driving, which simply lowers the standard miles per gallon and MPG for a typical vehicle. There could be other reasons, like a driver using the organization’s vehicle for personal needs, using long routes, etc.
Luckily, all the causes mentioned can be monitored using a vehicle tracker. You can know when drivers are idling and ask them to turn the engine off through alerts. Moreover, duplicate alerts can notify you of drivers’ driving habits and provide valuable techniques to reduce fuel expenses.
2. Increasing Driver Accountability
Drivers are the most important assets you can have as a fleet manager. With accountable drivers, you can worry less about the deliverables and safety on the road; otherwise, you may go through so many losses. A fleet tracker doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be tracking every driver’s move, but it helps ensure they stay compliant and disciplined while driving.
Typically, you should be able to evaluate your drivers and encourage them to improve for optimum productivity and efficiency. A vehicle tracker provides visibility to determine the driver’s behavior and ensure the vehicle is used for the rightful purpose.
Moreover, with a geofencing feature, you can restrict your vehicle from passing your areas of interest, such as business headquarters, job sites, and yards. Ideally, you get alerts when a vehicle wants to leave such zones, so it’s less likely any driver would leave these sites.
3. Improve Back-Office Efficiency
So much is done in the back office for a seamless transportation practice. You must go through lots of paperwork and switch multiple software platforms often to balance your math. Plus, you must always communicate with drivers to ensure their safety and that of the cars. Also, reaching out to customers back and forth for location updates and assigning jobs to a driver close to the customer can be time-consuming and overwhelming, especially if you have a large fleet.
Fortunately, you can streamline all these with a real-time GPS tracking solution. Trackers can ideally integrate seamlessly into back-office software and fleet management through application program interfaces and APIs. Subsequently, you can manage all the data conveniently in one place.
Moreover, you don’t have to call your drivers every time as you can see what’s happening in real-time and offer text guidelines.
4. Improving Route Planning
Not all routes are similar, so your drivers shouldn’t just use any route for optimum efficiency. Based on historical data that a fleet manager can get from a GPS vehicle tracker, it’s possible to identify and optimize routes for a fleet.
This leads to low operation costs, reduced travel times, and safety while enhancing timely deliveries and optimum customer satisfaction.
5. Improving Dispatching System
Another benefit a fleet tracking solution can give your business is improving your dispatching system. Because of the real-time access to the location and condition of your business vehicles, it’s often easier to determine which vehicle to perform which task.
Ideally, it’s not entrepreneurial to assign a task to a vehicle that’s miles away when there’s one just close to the destination. But how can you get this information without fleet tracking technology?
Conclusion
Improved fleet efficiency is the cornerstone of successful business operations. That’s because transportation and delivery of products and services is a significant function for every business to customers. In the quest for improving the efficiency of fleet management, GPS vehicle trackers have provided impactful results to businesses and organizations.
As we move forward, nothing can retard your transportation and logistic growth if you embrace these systems. You will benefit from the above and much more with an effective tracker.