Much of what Microlise does is geared toward engaging drivers and ensuring they’re working toward helping you to achieve your company goals.
Our product set also includes features that help office staff manage drivers on a day-to-day basis via simple driver communications, through journey information that is fed into in-cab devices, through our A-G driving style reports and journey debrief, or by using retrieved camera footage as a training aid.
However, there’s one very specific – and perhaps under-utilised and free to use function, which helps you and your drivers to remain compliant with drivers’ hour rules..
Remaining Driving Time provides office staff with a near live view of a driver’s mode information as standard, outlining the driver’s day in terms of break information and driving time. Over the course of two weeks, this data builds to offer a rough guide to driver’s hours… and more crucially, indicates how much time they may have remaining.
The information panel is enabled by first clicking on a vehicle in the map screen. The Remaining Driving Time tab provides a graphical representation of the driver’s hours including the current mode, live driving time and rest period taken, which will all be accurate when applied to a standard driving day.
It’s a very handy guide and it’s available now… however just using modes data has its limitations – for example, an agency driver may have worked elsewhere that week limiting collated historical modes data. The ‘where has my data come from’ link reveals a table displaying the last two weeks of driving, and indicates if the data is based solely on modes data, whether data is missing on given days or whether other, more accurate sources of data can be referenced, such as Remote Tachograph Download.
When our Remote Tachograph Download is added to the Microlise system, tacho data is used to build a picture of a driver’s two-week historical view. Data is drawn remotely from the driver card via the tacho head unit, thereby increasing accuracy. Remaining driving hours for that day – whether the driver has an extended shift left to use the hours remaining in their current week and a view of hours in the following week – are all calculated taking the previous two weeks of driving data into account.
How is this used in real life?
A customer calls and requests a last-minute collection of several, much needed roll cages. You decide it’s advantageous – both as a service to the customer and as a benefit to your operation to collect them as soon as possible.
Firstly you’ll need to use the ‘Find Nearest Vehicle’ function. From the map screen you can enter the collection point details using the address, postcode or lat/long and plot a radius to locate any vehicles in the immediate vicinity of the collection point.
When you click on a suitable vehicle, more information pops up on the right of the screen. When the Remaining Driving Time tab is activated, a graphical representation of the driver’s hours is shown.
Check live driving time… Will they need a break soon and how will this potentially affect their arrival time? How much time does the driver have left within their daily driving? Does the driver have enough time to complete the journey? If it’s tight, does the driver have the option to extend their hours today? Will this job impact the rest of their week? Check where this data has come from… are there gaps in historical data?
There’s also a list view of drivers available from the main menu so you can see any and all drivers that have sufficient time to complete the job.
Where TruTac TruAnalysis is also being used, actual working time can also be checked using the options to link through to driver information. This integration will also flag any other work carried out in addition to driving.
If everything is in order, simply add the job to the driver’s journey in our Journey Management product and send an update to the driver, safe in the knowledge that they can complete their work without infringement.
Using Remaining Driving Time helps office staff to make informed decisions on whether or not to send a driver to complete the job or whether it may be prudent to find an alternative driver with enough driving time remaining.
The Remaining Driving Time feature is freely available to users of the Microlise Fleet Performance product and can be activated simply by contacting your account manager. It’s a useful feature that can keep you on track and compliant regardless of how your working day and scheduling needs to change.
