Companies with road vehicle fleets are prime targets for automation. Fleet managers often have to control many processes, from dispatching drivers to overseeing fuel consumption patterns.
To take care of it all, they’re utilising fleet management software, which has evolved to do more than just store data or track vehicle locations.
Fleet camera systems, remote tachograph downloads, and driver behaviour analysis are just some of the automation innovations that are transforming different vehicle-related industries. Let’s discover how!
Cameras that filter footage
These days, many companies install cameras on their vehicles for a variety of reasons, such as to get accident footage, help drivers check blindspots or for live monitoring in general.
As you can imagine, if a camera records the full journey of a long-haul truck, there’s going to be a whole lot of material to go through to find that one relevant moment.
That’s where automation kicks in – modern fleet cameras have sensors that can detect noteworthy events, such as collisions. With proper fleet management software, you can remotely view that specific moment, complete with metadata, like who was the driver, when it happened, and where.
To save even more time, fleet managers can set up and receive notifications when cameras detect relevant events. Humans are left with the most important part of the process – deciding what to do about it.
In some cases, that would mean quickly jumping to the camera’s livestream to find out more, while in other situations the material would be stored for future reference.
Automated tachograph downloads
The tachograph is an essential part of the long-haul transportation industry. It records the duration of drivers’ work and rest periods, among other things.
Where things get complicated, however, is that the data generated by a tachograph needs to be downloaded to an external storage every once in a while. Imagine having to visit hundreds of trucks and manually connect to every tachograph, then keeping the data on a specific computer in an office!
Here automation can provide a huge benefit to trucking companies. If a vehicle is equipped with a compatible telematics device, it can receive the data from the tachograph and then upload it to fleet management software.
The process is completely automatic, the download intervals can be customised, and data can be easily presented to authorities. This process is called remote tachograph download and is a no-brainer for larger fleets.
Targeted performance analysis
For the time being, most fleets still employ drivers behind the wheel. To improve their performance in terms of efficiency and safety, managers need information on what exactly to improve.
How to get it? You can, of course, sit next to them during daily routes and make notes, but what if there are hundreds of drivers? Time for automation!
Like tachograph downloads, driver behaviour analysis utilises an advanced telematics device installed on a vehicle, and a fleet management platform. The device can detect various driving actions and events, such as the usage of cruise control, sudden braking, aggressive manoeuvring, and more.
This data gets sent to the fleet management platform where it’s analysed and presented in an easy-to-understand way. Depending on the configuration, the system will assign a better or worse score for each driver. Then it’s up to the fleet manager to act on this data – provide coaching, award a bonus, and so on.
What’s more, driving behaviour analysis can be supplemented with data from other systems. Commonly, companies track fuel consumption of a vehicle and check how it fluctuates depending on who’s behind the wheel.
Another option is to use the previously mentioned fleet cameras in conjunction with a telematics device, giving fleet managers a full picture – video events plus practical driving parameters.
Automation is here to stay
These three areas – cameras, tachograph downloads, and driving performance analysis – are not the only ones when it comes to automation in the fleet management sector.
There’s an automated alert for just about any situation that’s worth alerting about; there’s automated working time tracking so drivers don’t need to worry about clocking in and out; there are even systems that can automatically assign drivers and plan the best routes for them based on a variety of factors.
All that is to say – to stay competitive, you need to start automating your fleet management!