There are a vast and robust variety of fleet management products on the market today. These fleet products cover everything from GPS trackers to driver dash-cameras and even transport-truck temperature gauges. With so much technology available it can be hard to discern what exactly a fleet product is, what it does and how one works.
What is a Fleet Product?
A fleet product has is a three-part-tool used to understand, manage and improve the use of a company’s business vehicles.
Hardware
One part of the tool is the hardware that is installed or attached to the company car. The way in which this hardware is installed can vary depending on the product. For example, if the fleet product is a GPS tracker it is often plugged into the OBD interface of the vehicle, located in the top right of your vehicle’s footwell.
Software
The second part of the fleet product tool is the software. A fleet tracking software allows you to access all the data collected by your fleet product hardware. The ideal tracking software should be user friendly and intuitive. Softwares such as Vimcar’s Fleet Geo allow you to view past routes, check on the live status of a vehicle and create security alarms to reduce the chances of a vehicle being moved without your permission.
Customer Service
The third part of the tool is the customer service offered by the provider. A relationship with your fleet product provider will help you get the most out of your hardware and software. The ideal fleet product provider is an expert in its field. They will offer intuitive tools that help you optimise vehicle operations and reduce business costs.
The end goal of a fleet product is to help those companies which rely on vehicles day-to-day. A fleet product can be used to better understand how to improve vehicle usage and ultimately reduce risks and costs, and save time.
What Does a Fleet Product Do?
Today fleet products can be beneficial in many ways. A fleet management product, such as a fleet management system, can help you protect your vehicles against theft, create transparency between you and your drivers and help increase your customer satisfaction.
Managing a vehicle feet, large or small, can be a real challenge at times. There are many tasks that come with the management of fleet such as:
- Fleet analysis, reporting and optimisation
- Driver’s licence check
- Vehicle maintenance and services
- Vehicle purchase, leasing and selling
- Fuel consumption
- Cost controls
- Mileage supervision
- Contract management and insurance
- Pool vehicle management
- Communication with drivers
A fleet product offers ways to digitze some of these tasks. Digitizing tasks such as fleet analysis, reporting and optimisation can save your business a lot of time and money. Fleet products also help reduce the amount of human error and make it easier to share date across different departments.
Some of the features of a fleet product include:
- Sending warning messages in the event of undesired vehicle movements
- Displaying the live locations and routes of all tracked vehicles
- The option to download past traveled routes with sufficient detail
- Digital documentation of daily vehicle mileage
How Does a Fleet Product Work?
Although some companies are use to conducting their car fleet management “the good old way” and are unfamiliar with modern fleet products, it is worth making the small investment for most of them. These products are normally very simple, hands-off and require little to no technical skills. It is important to choose a provider with good customer service.
Here is a break down of how a fleet product works:
The fleet products hardware device reads and transmits the vehicle’s information. The information is sent to a centralised system where it will be analysed. Moreover, this device is equipped with a GPS module precisely documenting the vehicle’s position, travelling routes and speeds.
The software processes the data. It combines and analyses the data collected from the vehicle through the plug and adds the information from the GPS module. This is processed and used to understand how the vehicle is being driven and how it could be deployed more efficiently. This happens with all the vehicles within the fleet in real time; therefore the software is not only able to analyse and provide information on one particular vehicle, but can also do this for a group of vehicles (for example vans or trucks) or an entire fleet combining all vehicle groups.
As this technology is new to many and some are not familiar with how it works, customer support is as important as the hardware and the software themselves. In order to make the most of the available data and achieve better fleet management, good communications between the user and provider are essential.
Read more: Vimar’s Fleet Tracking Solutions
Future Trends
Considering the speed at which technology is evolving, it is important to start looking into these new ways to manage and improve fleets. In the future, predictive fleet products will provide advance notification of when a vehicle needs repair and calculate routes in advance based on data available from weather stations, other vehicles and infrastructure. Don’t get stuck in “the good old way” and wake up one day to self-driving and autonomous vehicles. Move your fleet forward today and invest in a fleet product that invests in you.
Other articles you might enjoy: Vehicle Tracking Prices, Fleet Monitoring and Fitting a Car Tracker