What does Fleet Performance mean to you? Delivering your service to customers better, faster, cheaper, in a more intelligent way? Is it about increased utilisation of your fleet – reducing empty loads out on the roads? Or improving the performance of your drivers and making sure the highest compliance standards are met and exceeded?
Is the priority in cutting your fuel or maintenance bill? Maybe that’s not as essential now as twelve months ago, with the price of a barrel of oil hitting rock bottom, but rest assured normal service will be resumed at some stage with profit margins once again squeezed.
Perhaps your objective is more a matter of corporate social responsibility? Do you have an ambitious target to reduce greenhouse emissions – or is enhancing safety and security for drivers your primary objective?
We have developed a product designed to help you deliver Fleet Performance improvements. It’s packed full of features to give you, your fleet managers and driver trainers the information they need to put a continuous development programme in place – whether you have a fleet of 50 or 1000 HGVs. Let’s take a look at the key features.
Real-Time Vehicle Tracking and Playback
As you would expect, with Fleet Performance, you can instantly see where your tractors, trailers and other assets are on a map and filter them by group, location, vehicle type and time. Time is one of the crucial components of this as it allows a function we call playback, which lets you see how your fleet was performing at a given time, or in a given location in detail. This can be an invaluable tool when incidents inevitably happen, or are alleged to have happened, whilst your trucks are out on the roads doing their job.
Driver and Vehicle Performance Management
Fleet Performance helps you understand where your vehicles are, what they have been doing, how much they are being used, how economically and safely they are being driven and to know that they are secure. With Fleet Performance, we provide the tools to help monitor and motivate drivers by encouraging them to adopt a fuel efficient and safe driving style.
Through monitoring, debrief and regular coaching in good driving practice, significant savings in fuel costs can be realised within your fleet. This is achieved by allowing you to identify drivers that require additional training, but also those that have shown improvement and development of their skills. The insight gained allows you to manage by exception, targeting training resource where it will have the most impact and deliver the most benefit as well as helping to celebrate success when drivers perform well.
Working in coordination with Fleet Performance and the full reporting suite, we’ve also developed the Driver Performance Management app, available on both Android and Apple devices. It gives drivers access to their own performance information and helps them compare their performance with that of their fellow drivers in an easily understood league table format. Managers can also log in to see all their drivers’ performance details in one place.
Safety Module Including Incident Data Recorder
With safety an exceptionally important topic for fleet operators, we’ve developed a set of tools to not only reduce the severity and number of accidents, but also reduce the cost impact when claims do have to be made.
Claiming quickly and having all of the evidence to hand when a claim does need to be made, or defended, is essential to making sure costs stay under control. The Microlise Safety Module, which is part of Fleet Performance, addresses all of these issues with the option to deploy forward facing cameras and an Incident Data Recorder to enable a detailed insight into what was happening 30 seconds before and after an incident. In fact, we have written a full product insight blog on this topic.
Remote Digital Tachograph Download
A new generation of tachographs has hit the shelves and they are making life easier for drivers and fleet operators by reducing administration overheads, streamlining compliance and supporting timely and accurate reporting. The capability of the mobile network has caught up with demand and many fleet operators are now using it to download tacho data safely, securely and in full compliance. In fact, obtaining the data in this way can make it even easier to use this information in other business areas, such as payroll whilst ensuring compliance requirements are met while keeping overhead costs to a minimum. Read more about this feature in our full product insight blog on the topic.
Driver Communication
By either deploying the Microlise ruggedised 7” Android DriveTab tablet, or an alternative Android device, driver performance and task management information, as well as important communications, can safely reach drivers whilst they are out on the road. When using the in cab device, drivers can also complete and record vehicle walkarounds, with this data fed into the system for review by management. All communications are designed to be delivered in the most appropriate and safest way.
Using Fleet Performance, Microlise customers have reduced costs by as much as 10 percent, by using the tools above to focus on key performance indicators like reducing idling, cutting out bad driving habits and identifying which drivers in the fleet will benefit the most from training.
Summary
Microlise Fleet Performance removes technical jargon and focusses on actionable, clear and concise information presented in an intuitive way. With tools to improve driver communication, safety and compliance, as well as driver and vehicle performance, it delivers a powerful proposition.
