When it comes to business, who doesn’t like saving a few pounds, dollars or euros?
What if you could save money and also do a better job by reducing customer waiting times, improving environmental outcomes and operating more efficiently?
To some extent, this is achievable through the use of the latest technology dubbed telematics. Telematics or vehicle tracking provides an excellent strategic cost reduction strategy for businesses running a commercial fleet of vehicles. There are many things the latest telematics and vehicle tracking technologies can offer in terms of reducing costs and optimising performance in commercial operations.
Here’s a look at five ways that vehicle tracking can save your business money:
1. Reduce Wastage
Different loads can generate different types of waste. Engine emissions are a potential problem, as are human waste and sewage, water, and various packaging materials. Vehicle tracking can help to waste less by assisting fleet managers to deliver their loads to their destinations on time, safely and to specification.
And whether you’re hauling food, medicine or concrete, fewer wasted loads means lower costs, instantly and directly. It also means that you’re building and maintaining a reputation as a reliable partner, thereby enabling you to be awarded future work.
Moreover, once you encourage your drivers to look after your fleet vehicles, your loads, know when and where by making routes optimised, and supply the knowledge on where to fill up, your vehicles will spend more time out there earning your money and better serving your customers too.
2. Achieve better fuel efficiency
The under-utilisation of road space slows down travelling time; vehicles move at slower speeds, while traffic lights cause a needless build-up of cars. All of these factors contribute to fuel inefficiency because the business is using more petrol than necessary.
But with telematics and vehicle tracking you can harness a wide range of metrics and data insight to optimise your fleet toward more fuel-efficient vehicles, cleaner drivers and routes with the least amount of wasted miles. These problems can all be fixed with a combination of fleet tracking tools and training schemes over time to help fuel efficiency metrics improve.
3. Lower Insurance Premiums
In fact, most recent studies have shown that they can lead to substantial reductions in premiums, as telematics systems can be used to coach a fleet manager to get his drivers to drive in a better and safer manner. Moreover, many insurers give discounts to businesses that implement telematics and fleet tracking as part of a wider driver training and safety programme.
The fleet gets all the blame, unfortunately, when they are hit by the other driver. Even when the fleet driver is not their fault. So, with telematics, you see an added benefit of seeing how the vehicle was being driven and driven around closer to the time of the incident, even if the system is just a telematics box with no cameras. Fleets get the visibility they need to afford some protection from the perceived threat of blame.
4. Fleet Vehicles Last Longer
This equals cutting wasteful wear of your fleet vehicles and lowering service and maintenance expenditures. Fortunately, telematics and fleet tracking allow you to have full visibility over your entire fleet vehicles and record all the data you need to monitor and begin changing any driver behaviour that can create unnecessary wear and tear of your vehicles and ultimately your bottom-line profits.
I don’t know about you, but aggressive acceleration and sudden, jerky braking always make me think that – well, I don’t know what the poor things are thinking, but the noises coming out of their engines weren’t pretty. Aggressive driving can stress components in engines, transmissions, brake pads, and tyres. The harder and more aggressively vehicles have been driven, and the more frequent this behaviour has been, the more costs associated with maintenance and repair (expressed as dollar amounts) incurred. This includes costs that you’d incur to place the vehicles back on the road.
Vehicle tracking makes it easier to motivate and reward safer and more economical driving: soft speeds, gradual acceleration, gentle braking all extend vehicle life.
5. Deter Vehicle Theft
Vehicle theft is an issue that most fleet managers would have to accept. Sure, the existence of CCTV and dashcams has significantly reduced the rate of a vehicle being stolen, but up and down the country there’s still a lot of vehicle break-ins and thefts happening on a daily basis.
Installing a vehicle tracking system and making deterrent signage visible on and in your vehicles can stop thieves who want an easy job. Most would-be thieves don’t have the tools or know-how to bypass and remove vehicle tracking systems. Real-time telematics and vehicle tracking cut down on an aspect of the crime that many would-be criminals are looking for in an ideal job – a quick, easy and risk-free way to make some easy cash.
Conclusion
If you are interested in saving money, www.radius.com/en-ie/ supplies a wide range of modern hardware and software products for better fleet management to provide companies with minimisation in their fleet operating expenses.
Our revolutionary telematics solutions will reduce your business vehicle insurance premiums and fuel costs and we’ve invested in developing some of the most sophisticated devices and fleet management software on the market, while also ensuring our systems are quick to install and easy to use.
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