Tech Alert! How far can you go to improve your fleet management app?

Take a minute to answer these questions before reading on. Can you list down your top challenges in managing your fleet? Read on when you are done.

Here are a few that might resonate. Go through them and let us know if you have anything different on your list.

1. Increase fleet utilization
2. Measure fleet productivity
3. Cut operational costs
4. Make smarter assignments
5. Increase profitability
   

Businesses often confuse fleet management with scheduled dispatch to a roster of drivers followed by tracking. In reality, most business operations are far more dynamic, on-demand and need to adapt every minute. This is the prime reason why logistics businesses struggle with the challenges mentioned earlier and face adverse consequences.

What's next? Logistics is getting more real-time and automated. Your fleet management technology needs to follow suit and upgrade from static to dynamic too. This will typically involve adding business intelligence to existing applications or insourcing the fleet app or control center.

"Turning challenges into opportunities"- A step ahead towards progress.
Here is how your fleet management technology should upgrade, turning struggles into opportunities, to deliver better overall operations.

Challenge 1—Increase fleet utilization
Fleet downtime can significantly impact operational efficiency of your business. When you use software that automates the roster and runsheet for the next day, it is smart about figuring out the most optimal routes based on the information available a priori. What happens when things change on the ground on the day of? Using real-time location intelligence can help manage exceptions like delays, cancelations, accidents and priority orders, and cover for them before your customers and brand reputation are impacted.

How does HyperTrack help in increasing fleet utilization?
HyperTrack offers live location intelligence at the point of action. Fleet managers have a comprehensive aggregate view of real-time operations through a KPI-driven scoreboard, with drill downs to isolate individual incidents. The predictive analysis will help in catching on-field problems before they happen.

P.S.: Get a complete overview of the scoreboard.

Challenge 2—Measure Fleet Productivity
You can only improve what you can measure. Businesses are going through digital transformation and field operations are a top area of consideration. Tracking how time is spent on the field, at stops, routes and in between, and correlating that time with outcomes achieved from those visits is a great way to measure granular productivity. Greater visibility and transparency allows your team to identify highlights and lowlights by teams, customers, places, individuals and any other grouping of your operations business.

If you are still stuck in antiquated processes where the fleet needs to use pencil-whipping procedures or phone calls, productivity will remain a matter of personal opinion. This can stagnate your fleet performance and cause friction between stakeholders.

How does HyperTrack help in measuring fleet productivity?
The granulat location timeline with activity, outage, visits, routes and idle time, allows the ops team to get a third-eye view of fleet location. The location-based APIs are known to generate accurate map-matched distances that help eliminate disputes around actual distance driven and other non-repudiation matters concerning ground truth.

Read here: Tracking- All you need to know!

Challenge 3—Cut operational costs
Mileage-based tracking and automation of financial payouts to fleet agents can help cut down unnecessary operational costs of your logistic business. Apart from avoiding underpayment or overpayment, it helps build trust in the network where the drivers, managers and customers feel confident about the economics. Automation further allows you to re-align your resources for more core business operations and stay one step ahead of the competitors.

How does HyperTrack help in cutting operational costs?
The real-time transparency between fleet agents, ops manager and customers helps in alerting the drivers to eliminate unnecessary overheads. Once you bring in visibility, the system self-corrects and improves organically. Many operational inefficiencies live longer than they should because they go unnoticed.

Click here to read about mileage tracking and financial payouts automation.

Challenge 4—Make smarter assignments
Even a small number of fleets need to be managed and allocated smartly. Brute force methods fail to optimize to the extent software can. Most operations start small, with time-to-market pressures and then grow with the business. For a handful of vehicles, you might feel that a round-robin scheduling technique or manual assignment works just fine. But as the business grows, you need to make sure that allocation is smarter about factoring in many more variables. This has a direct impact on ROI.

How does HyperTrack help in making smarter assignments?
HyperTrack offers assignment automation for on-demand and scheduled orders. Assignment factors in order locations, slot commitments, fleet capacity, per trip order capacity, service time per order, batching of orders, sticky routing and live location of drivers. These routes are created in a way that may be modified based on other proprietary criteria in your system.

Are you interested in reading more about myths associated with delayed deliveries? Click here.

Challenge 5—Increase profitability
Data-driven decision making requires the right business analytics tools to support decision making. Getting insights from geolocation data has been hard because of the ability to merge this data with business entities and metrics in a seamless way. Location-based insights will only reveal bottlenecks when location data is overlaid with application data.

How does HyperTrack help in increasing the profitability of your business?
Insights provide application-integrated location intelligence to identify operational bottlenecks and reveal hidden trends. Which teams are most productive, which customers are happier, which addresses are least accurate, which drivers are best at adhering to process, which vehicles perform the best, which phones provide best quality locations, and more.

Options to upgrade your fleet management technology
As you research your options to transform your fleet management to the latest and greatest technology, you will end up with the classic build versus buy dilemma. Should you choose to build your own fleet management system to suit your unique business needs that off-the-shelf software is too brittle to address, you will be faced with another fork in the road.

1. Build my own location infrastructure for OS, cloud and maps
2. Build with location APIs and SDKs (managed service)
   

After factoring in the costs & final results of both the options, here is the synopsis of what should be ideally done and why?

References:

• 80% of apps take 3+ months to develop
• $5k to $50k is the average cost to develop a basic app (features)
• 67% of developers don’t break even
• 57% of businesses preferred Managed services instead of hiring ( talent acquisition)
  
  Building with HyperTrack’s location cloud is the best way to achieve time to market, lower cost to operate, and a better product experience that updates to the latest OS, cloud and maps technologies while you are asleep. Should you decide to build your own fleet management applications, HyperTrack is the way to go.
  
  

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