Knowing where your vehicles are and how they’re being used is critical for today’s fleet managers. Increased visibility into your fleet enables better tracking of driver behavior, operations and compliance.
With these insights, you can optimize routes, reduce waste, improve customer satisfaction and get ahead of potential problems before they happen. In this post, we’ll explore practical strategies to boost visibility across your fleet.
The power of seamless inspections
In a perfect world, 100% of your fleet inspections would be timely, accurate and fully completed by drivers. This would arm managers with comprehensive data to optimize operations and maintenance.
With robust inspection data, you can:
- Predict and prevent issues through proactive maintenance
- Save time otherwise wasted on messy data or communications
- Make informed choices based on reliable metrics
Well-run inspections are essential for drivers, mechanics and managers, giving the full team visibility into:
- Vehicle safety: Avoid fines, repairs, and legal issues.
- Asset tracking: See real-time location and condition of vehicles.
- Driver habits: Monitor route compliance, timeliness, and mileage.
- Cost savings: Early maintenance prevents breakdowns and downtime.
The challenge is not just collecting accurate data, but actually using it. Focus on getting the entire team on the same page, with access to the information they need to guide better decisions.
Streamline inspections with softwares and apps
Fleet inspection apps like Whip Around provide an ideal digital solution to the pitfalls of paper-based processes and other outdated tools.
Paperwork is time-consuming, prone to illegible handwriting and difficult to organize, store and quickly retrieve. Digital inspections address these issues by:
- Speeding up the process with customized forms
- Ensuring accuracy and quality
- Enabling automated alerts
- Reducing downtime through connected maintenance
Drivers can complete inspections on their devices from manager-created templates, including functionality for capturing photos of potential faults. Optical character recognition captures odometer data to track mileage and schedule maintenance, and once repairs are done, mechanics e-sign for a complete service record.
Alerts can also notify drivers of missed or overdue inspections. The right inspection app provides oversight along with the benefits of mobility and digitization.
Leverage fleet management services
A fleet management service is a company or solution that helps organizations manage, maintain and optimize their fleet of vehicles. A quality service will provide data visibility to key stakeholders in your fleet’s operations, incorporating a variety of information collection and analysis functions.
This might include:
- Vehicle tracking: Using GPS and telematics to monitor location and usage of vehicles
- Maintenance management: Scheduling preventive maintenance, managing repairs, coordinating with mechanics
- Fuel management: Monitoring fuel consumption and optimizing processes to reduce costs
- Routing & dispatching: Planning optimal routes and dispatching drivers efficiently
- Reporting & analytics: Leveraging data on vehicles and drivers to identify areas for improvement
- Asset lifecycle management: Managing acquisition, maintenance history and disposal of fleet vehicles
- Compliance management: Ensuring adherence to regulations and preparedness for DOT audits
A fleet management service can enhance visibility across key teams in several ways:
- For drivers: Telematics and GPS tracking provides real-time location monitoring and can track metrics like speeding and hard braking. Drivers get feedback to improve safety.
- For mechanics: Digital vehicle inspections, repair requests and maintenance tracking gives mechanics full visibility into vehicle condition and upcoming service needs.
- For fleet managers: Centralized dashboards roll up data on vehicles, drivers, fuel and other costs. Managers can monitor operations and make data-driven decisions.
- For safety leaders: Video telematics, risky driving alerts and accident tracking helps safety leaders identify problems, coach drivers and proactively improve policies.
Collaboration features like shared checklists, commenting and messaging fosters communication between teams. Everyone has visibility into issues, actions taken and responsibilities.
By consolidating data and reports to provide insights that are visible to everyone, teams will naturally become less siloed and more collaborative. This improves coordination and accountability across the workforce.
Everyone getting on the same page leads to a safer, more productive fleet.
Putting it all into practice
Data itself is of little consequence unless the information is used to make changes that will improve performance.
Let’s take a look at the Whip Around dashboard.
The information in the dashboard can be filtered by date range and teams. The example above includes the total number of inspections performed, the average time it took to perform the inspection, the number of reported defects and the number of days to correct the defect.
This data is displayed in weekly time intervals. Under this graph you’ll find the percentage of inspected assets, percentage of inspected drivers and percentage of assets with defects. You can easily determine how many inspections each driver has completed and the assets with the most defects.
All this information can be easily interpreted in a matter of seconds. It’s a powerful tool!
Gain better visibility
Managing a fleet involves many moving parts and people. But new technology tools are making it easier to cut through the clutter and gain true visibility.
Whip Around is an easy-to-use fleet maintenance software platform that offers digital inspections, customizable checklists, work order management, real-time and historical fleet health data, maintenance scheduling, compliance resources, reporting and fuel management — to name a few of our capabilities.
Schedule a demo or start a free trial to discover how Whip Around can help take your fleet to the next level. Questions? Just give us a shout and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
