Transforming operations one journey at a time
Vehicle tracking specialist Quartix offers its take on the financial and safety benefits fleets can tap into using telematics packages
Fuel and vehicle maintenance are often two of the biggest business expenditures for businesses in the logistics industry or passenger transport. Telematics can offer a host of insights to allow businesses to drive down these costs, but some are more obvious than others.
Time- and fuel-efficient driving
By pinpointing specific instances of excess fuel consumption and undue vehicle wear and tear, a vehicle tracking system can bring about change. Aspects such as driver behaviours, mileage, vehicle utilisation and time management can all be measured and altered to produce better outcomes.
If a fleet travels in the region of 50,000 miles per year with up to 20 vehicles, it is possible that the annual fuel expenditure is £280,000. We can be certain it’s no small sum. In order to define more efficient routes, the routes that are currently being travelled need to be understood.
A vehicle tracking system will show live locations and traffic updates to avoid long waits; detailed route maps highlighting crossover journeys; daily driver timesheets to validate working hours; divergences from geofenced areas; and driver behaviour including harsh braking, speeding and idling.
Depending on how much fuel is initially being wasted, and how many unnecessary miles accrued, fuel expenditure could be reduced by as much as 25 per cent, according to a study by Frost & Sullivan. But the savings go beyond fuel consumption: fewer miles mean less vehicle wear and tear and more available employee time.
Monitoring waiting times
Waiting time at delivery sites is a common annoyance for many industries, and many will charge for that time in the form of demurrage. Perhaps a driver is waiting at a depot for two hours. How does the business calculate what it could have earned, as well as what it’s lost, during those hours?
With an accurate record of waiting times against each location, it is much easier to reclaim that cost. Telematic data can also highlight vehicle’s that are left idling, using unnecessary fuel.
Preserving vehicle health
When a vehicle is used frequently, signs of wear and tear quickly appear. Harsh braking, driving at high speeds, and of course collisions, will take their toll on a vehicle’s parts. Ensuring drivers are navigating the roads at sensible speeds, and changing speed smoothly extends the life of a fleet.
Tyres, brakes, servicing, maintenance, and financial depreciation can all be influenced by subtle changes to driver behaviour.
The Quartix vehicle tracking system calculates simple driver scores based on a driver’s braking and acceleration profile. These are compared across a group of drivers in the driver league table, which many businesses use as a basis for competitions or incentive programs to reward good driving, and to coach drivers with below average scores.
Many businesses using telematics have drawn strong correlations between good driver scores and vehicles with lower fuel consumption and lower maintenance costs.
Encouraging safer driving
A high rate of fatal accidents take place on rural roads, despite drivers rarely exceeding these roads’ legal speed limit. While it is important to enforce, low instances of speeding amongst a fleet is not always a sure-fire indicator of safe driving. Tight bends on 60mph roads should safely be taken at sub-30mph speeds, highlighting a crucial aspect of defining safe speeds – context.
Quartix provides a better measurement of safe speeds for fleets; The Relative Speed Score uses contextual data to give a complete picture of driving performance.
By measuring the speed of thousands of vehicles every day across the country, Quartix has designed the award-winning SafeSpeed database. Using this data, any driver’s speed, at any location, can be compared to the average speed of other vehicles that have travelled on that same section of road, offering invaluable insight into driver safety.
The colour-coded indicator shows how much a driver is deviating from normal speeds on the roads they travel and the level of risk they take.
The Relative Speed Score can be combined with other indicators to form a complete assessment of driver behaviour to further support competitions and incentives programmes for safe, economical driving initiatives.
Creating productivity KPIs
Making sure that employees take adequate breaks in the day is paramount, particularly if they are spending several hours on the road. Telematics can monitor this with driver timesheets, allowing businesses to ensure that the right amount of break time is being taken.
Quartix utilisation dashboards show which vehicles are stationary and which are in use. KPI alerts can be set to trigger if less than a certain number of stops have been made by a certain time, helping businesses to connect with their fleet operations and stay on top of workloads.
Making informed decisions
Instant access to the location of vehicles can be an invaluable tool. This knowledge can enable businesses to plan more effectively and manage expectations. A postcode can be entered to the Quartix system to display where the rest of a fleet are in relation to it, in order of their proximity
With this information to hand, businesses can quickly send the closest driver to recover a delivery, transfer goods, or perhaps divert the closest repair vehicle to an incident.
