You could operate a small business with a couple of trucks, or you could have thousands of vehicles in your fleet. To stay competitive, you should embrace fleet technology because of the many benefits, such as lowering costs, raising productivity, improving customer satisfaction and improving safety. All of these factors combine to make your company more competitive. Telematics technology today offers us far more than simple GPS technology. Companies that don’t adopt it may fall behind the competition.
Minimize Your Administrative Burden
Electronic logging devices (ELDs) will track and record the movement of vehicles. Eliminate much of the paperwork and administrative burden that falls on you otherwise. ELDs drop the need to manually track the hours-of-service from truckers. You can save a great deal on time, cost and effort from doing it with this method. By installing ELDs on your fleet, you can track how much time drivers spend idle.
Save thousands of dollars picking out the drivers who spend too much time idling or doing it too frequently. Companies will also need to deal with lawsuits over accidents due to the nature of the business. Having ELDs on your trucks will reduce the amount of liability because of how this records evidence that can strengthen your case. Provided the driver made no hard turns, no speeding and no violations, it would prove the innocence of the driver and reduce liability.
Better Fuel Costs
One of the biggest things to eat into the bottom line at your company would be the fuel costs. Fleet managers must look for new ways to save on fuel constantly. Using fleet technology, you can monitor how often drivers fill up, how long they idle and look at vehicle fuel levels, fuel card for small business can be very helpful here. The information learned can be used to determine how to improve your performance.
Predictive Maintenance
Through the use of telematics, you can pinpoint problems with your trucks before the issue snowballs into bigger and more expensive problems. Many managers today will schedule maintenance at intervals, but this technology will enable you to do condition-based maintenance, and you can lower your supply costs for repairs. Because of automatic reminders and alerts, you won’t have to organize as much on maintenance. The technology will tell you about when you must perform maintenance. That especially proves helpful when you must manage thousands of trucks.
Lower Your Insurance Costs
Insurance companies have introduced AI tech into their practices with favorable outcomes, which should give you an incentive to use ELD tech in yours. Having ELDs in the truck will lower the cost of your premiums. Insurance companies do this because of how ELDs have a proven track record of lowering the risk of accidents. Increased safety means that they won’t have to pay out as much.
Along with safety from accidents, it improves safety from theft and hijacking because of the GPS technology installed in the ELD. After a theft, they can often trace the location of the vehicle to recover it. Because of that, they lower the insurance rates to make them more agreeable. You want to do this because of how a lower insurance price will increase your profits and help your business through the hard times.
