Beating Driver Fatigue on Long Hauls
Managing a large fleet of vehicles is incredibly complex because there are so many variables to consider. Are your assets being used effectively? Have you done everything in your power to ensure driver safety? What trends are eating into your profitability and how can they be addressed?
Whether you work in oil and gas or mining, construction or transportation, there are key performance indicators (KPIs) that have a major impact on the performance of your business. These vary from industry to industry, and even from company to company within each of those industries.
These KPIs need to be managed through a decision-making framework so that you have visibility of how your fleet, groups, individual assets and drivers are tracking against those targets. Armed with this information you can implement new policies designed to drive your business towards its key targets. At Navman Wireless, we call it Adaptive Intelligence. Here are a few examples of how it could help improve your business operations:
Asset utilisation
Which of the vehicles in your fleet were used today and how long were they on the road? That's an easy report to generate if you're tracking engine hours across the fleet. If you're running a logistics business, increasing the number of hours a truck spent doing deliveries last month is likely to be one of your most important KPIs. By contrast, service firms love to reduce engine hours because they want more time on site where technicians are being paid.
Tracking vehicles by group means you can see when the Brisbane branch is running at 50 per cent utilisation but Sydney, which has the same number of vehicles, is struggling to manage workloads. Maybe you need to move a couple of vans down the coast. Engine hours can also be used to schedule vehicle maintenance and replacement, which helps improve costing forecasts.
Fuel costs
Reporting every fuel transaction weekly, monthly or quarterly highlights situations where a truck has been refilled when it should have had another 500 kilometres of diesel in the tank. What if somebody is taking additional fuel so they can fill up their boat? Tracking the type of fuel purchased will let you know if somebody put petrol in their car and passed the receipt in for filling up a diesel truck. We have one transport customer who insists that the last driver to park a truck every night leaves it with a minimum level of fuel so the next day gets off to a good start.
Now fleet managers can see when fuel costs are on the rise and implement policies over the weeks and months ahead. Maybe drivers are given a target to reduce fuel costs by 10 per cent before the end of the financial year.
Driver safety
An entire working day can be broken into hourly buckets that measure driving times, speeding, idling or whatever you want to monitor. So, for example, you might want to know the total fleet's driving time by hours of the day. If I've got people doing significant hours between 8pm and 4am, it can be visualised with one hit. It goes down to individual vehicle or driver level. You can slice and dice information against the circadian rhythm to show how a driver was speeding or doing too much idling while at their least attentive.
You can separate out standard hours of work so one driver is tracked against 9am-5pm but another is 6am-2pm. These standard hours can be tailored to suit individual drivers and vehicles. For example, a fleet manager might want to know if anybody does more than 100 non-standard hours in a month.
Personalisation
A national fleet manager might have 20 branch managers who report into him. By tracking individual KPIs he can see that one driver has a high asset utilisation score but is in the red for negative metrics like fuel costs, speeding and idling. Another driver within the same branch is the exact opposite. In this situation you might introduce gamification and reward your top drivers for helping others to improve their skills and meet targets.
Customisation
Clients can implement positive or negative KPIs with the same data. Every customer wants something different but it's all customisable. You can track everything from speeding and idling to time on site, customer visits or jobs per day.? Taking it a step further you might decide to change how a report looks or even develop a completely new KPI.
Predictive Intelligence
Clients can use the rich analytical data sets available in Adaptive Intelligence to budget and plan for the future. Construction companies can use data on project sites to profile actual costs against plan. Sales and Service companies can profile customer visits and ensure their expectations are met while generating more information that can be used to further improve services. Transport companies can profile demurrage and stop times across the fleet to optimise logistics.
Organisational Reporting
With our experience of dealing with enterprise organisations across the globe, Navman Wireless understands the need to scale reporting so users, no matter where they are in the organisational hierarchy, can see what's relevant to them.? Our alignment with organisational charts and reporting capabilities bring this to every level of the enterprise.