Fleet Analytics – Drive into the future of fleet management
Anshul Bhatnagar
Co-Founder - Mandelbulb Technologies | I help companies turning Data Dreams into Strategy Streams | Your Go-To Maestro for the AI Era | Strategic Advisor on Modern Data Platforms
“Data analytics is the science behind a successful business. It holds all the answers.”
Fleet insights and analytics are progressively becoming the most important source of fleet management. Vehicle management and keeping a check of the expenses has been a tremendous task for fleet companies. The increase in demand and sales of vehicles has taken a steep turn from past decade. According to a survey, in 2021, around 12 million commercial vehicles were sold in the United States, up from approximately 11.5 million units reported in 2020. This type of vehicle includes motor vehicles used for transporting goods or paid passengers. Moreover, the growing interest of the companies in exploring varied markets further aided the growth of the sector.
The increasing demand and the growth of the market require better management and fleet analytics with the help of telematics, can make the businesses more flourishing and help in economical decisions.
Commercial vehicle sales from 2005 to 2021
The basic key to optimisation lies in pinpointing the shortcomings and inefficiency through data analysis leading to better and smarter decisions. The entire world is becoming tech-centric, so why not the fleet industries adapt the same and enjoy more efficiency, low costs, and grand success in their endeavours?
The Challenges Faced by Fleet Managers
Image Source :https://www.fleetistics.com/
Every management has its challenges and being a fleet manager one can face a number of problems in terms of costs, maintenance, and asset management. They find themselves buried under the pressure of time consuming and never-ending tasks, which might lead to inefficiency and increased operational costs. The major problems and challenges incurred in fleet management are:
Conducting supervision, administrative work, and indulged in heaps of data takes up a lot of efficiency. Here comes fleet analytics to rescue!
How to solve?
The right tool can provide fleet managers with complete visibility across their fleet operations and help them streamline day-to-day tasks and identify deeper issues that impact fleet and business performance.
With increase in the variety and size of the data, relying upon the traditional analytical tools is not the best option. To harness the power of big data sets and to gain insights out of it, modern cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure offers a great stack of technologies which are highly scalable, agile, performant, cost-effective and are designed specifically for such kind of analytics.
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Two decades ago, fleet management was primarily used for rental, lease, and recovering accidental costs. Now fleet management can benefit from all kinds of data right from the data acquired from the sensors on a truck to the telematics in a GPS system to spending feedback from a fuel card. Today, it has become valuable in terms of
What can be achieved?
To start with fleet analytics, organisations must categorise their needs and the benefits they want to reap. Need some inspiration?
Here are a few areas where fleet analytics can bring a value addition to improve fleet performance and management.
Fuel Optimisation
The biggest task in fleet companies is managing fuel costs. Data Intelligence and analytics can track down the usage of the fuel, measure economy, as well as prevent theft of the fuel. With fleet analytics, one can monitor the personal and professional use of the vehicle, and curate necessary company policies for the fleet usage. The data provides a comprehensive picture, thus leading to significant cost savings.
Data analytics proves to be a great tool to streamline all areas of fleet, giving the companies an opportunity to improve productivity, curate better policies, reduce inefficiency, and maximise profits.
Insurance
Telematics is quite beneficial when it comes to insurance. An increase in accidental rate of commercial vehicles has brought a new hike in curating insurance with the help of IoT. It was estimated that the increasing number of vehicles and fatal accidents, within five year, telematics based or UBI (Usage Based Insurance) was expected to account for 20% of all vehicles insured in the US, which is a significant opportunity for insurers, given the current estimate of 250+ million.
The telematics-based fleet insurance system can help the operators with premium rates and reduced costs, and also keeping a check on driving behaviour and practices. The telematics monitors the driver’s behaviour via OBDs or smartphones and generates the driver’s score based on his driving pattern such as speeding, hard braking, acceleration, lane changing, cornering, etc. It allows the fleet operators to assess the risk which further helps in engineering insurance policies. The data assists in creating a driver’s score and arriving at the insurance rate accordingly. One can save up to 40%, if a good score is maintained, also ensuring reduced costs.?
Asset Management
Telematics monitors cars, trucks, equipment, and other assets by using GPS technology and onboard diagnostics (OBD) to plot the asset's movements on a computerised map. For better asset management, analytics provides data to help one understand the assets’ utilisation in the company. One can build efficiency by analysing the idle time, vehicles in need of servicing, repairs, running time, etc.
By assessing the usage of these vehicles, one can increase operational efficiency and the allocation of the workforce for optimum benefits.?
There are other possible use-cases which can be implemented using Fleet Analytics such as predictive maintenance, route optimisation, trip summarisation, fleet heath analytics and many more.