NOT JUST NAVIGATION
Vehicle tracking and telematics: What’s the difference?
You may have found yourself wondering what the difference is between telematics and vehicle tracking. Both terms seem like they should be interchangeable… but are they?
Telematics originates from the French word télématique. It was coined in 1978 and comes from combining the French words for telecommunications and computing science. It’s defined as the “convergence of telecommunications and information processing.”
Telematics brings together fields of telecommunications, vehicular technologies, road transportation, road safety, wireless communications and computer science.
Vehicle tracking is just one smart technology that falls under the general umbrella of telematics, along with GPS navigation and a whole host of others.
Track your vehicles and drivers in real time. No need for additional software – everything is accessed over the web. With our Google-backed vehicle tracking map, you can access all your vehicle and driver information to see time-sheets and daily route maps.
The technology that makes vehicle tracking possible was first developed in the 1960s by the US Defense Department. In the late 1980s, civilian research into using telematics to improve road safety and reduce environmental impact began.
Owing to that research, in the mid-1990s the first vehicle tracking systems emerged and by the early 2000s, web-based fleet management systems were available to organizations. In 2010, smartphone apps were developed to link real-time information with mobile phones and tablets, making it even easier to get information instantaneously.
How is telematics used for vehicle tracking?
Telematics devices, including tracking units, are made up of several essential parts:
GPS receiver: Gets location information from the GPS satellite
Engine interface: Transforms and routes messages from the GPS
Sim card: Broadcasts GPS data to the main server via the mobile network
Accelerometer: Senses and records driving style and crash impact data
Battery voltage sensor: Detects unit tampering
Daily route maps
Quartix shows you all the journeys and routes taken on a day, with each way-point marked for direction and speed. Create your own ‘custom locations’ for regular customer sites to quickly see driver routes are within proximity of these locations. Click on the way-points for additional details on speed or zoom to exact location using Google Street View.
Quartix vehicle tracking is designed for you to help answer your questions about your drivers and vehicles quickly and simply.
Mobile App
View the real-time location of vehicles when you are out of office, and access driver route maps and driver behavior while on the move. You can also allow individual drivers to access their own driving style reports via the app – without giving them access to all drivers’ information. The app is free to download. Reports available on the move:
- Vehicle list showing all registered vehicles and current status
- Live vehicle tracking shows latest location in real time
- Trips showing day by day trips of the past 6 months
Daily driver briefing
Work with your drivers to improve driving styles and use data to show parts of their journey where they “lost” driver points, so they can review actual data and learn from experience.
The driver briefing report shows speeds for the day plus acceleration and braking profiles. To explore in detail the actual location of speeding or harsh braking incidents, it’s simple to click on the graph bars to see the Google Street View.
- Monitor speed, acceleration and braking profiles
- Compare driver behavior scores across a group of vehicles or the whole fleet
- Save on fuel and reduce risk of accident
Driver league table
Compare driver behavior scores across your entire fleet. Each driver is given a score based on their driving profile. Those who are taking too much risk will stand out on the Driver League Table in red. The best drivers will appear in green, and those in between will be amber.
The reports allows you to see acceleration and braking, and a simple click will take you to the exact location on Google maps where the incident took place, allowing you to investigate further.
Driving style trend
Quickly identify any driving style concerns that may need immediate attention. Working with your drivers, you can identify if their style is improving over time – over the course of a month you might expect to see an impact – and incorporate this into performance reviews or reward schemes to encourage better driving.
Trip reporter
If you have a large fleet or you simply need to see a lot of trips in a single report, Quartix offers an easy way to see a fleet’s total mileage, driving hours and idling time over a specified time period. Whether you need to report your fleet data by driver or by vehicle, the Trip Reporter summary shows the driving and idling times as well as the total for the whole of the report period.
At Quartix we know many of our customers like to receive data in Excel so they can easily integrate with existing management reports. So we’ve developed a number of very popular e-mail-able reports that can be delivered straight to your inbox every week or day.
Timesheets
Daily Vehicle Group Report
Save admin time and check actual overtime hours versus reported overtime. You can estimate expected fuel consumption versus actual fuel claims and eliminate any unauthorized fuel claims. The timesheet Excel workbook provides a summary tab for all the vehicles in a group, (see image). Additionally, there is a detailed tab for each vehicle showing detailed trip breakdown as well as a total for the day.
Key management information includes:
- Mileage and fuel usage
- Maximum speeds
- Shift times
- Total driving time
- Time spent at each site
Vehicle utilization analysis
You might have a policy in place for when you want to replace your old vehicles, or maybe you’re thinking about adding more vehicles to your fleet. The Quartix vehicle utilization report is a powerful tool to generate a more accurate analysis and forecast of your fleet usage. This can identify vehicles that are under-utilized, not in use or where space capacity can delay the need for additional vehicles. The report shows:
- Miles traveled per time period
- Travel time
- Idling time
- Idling %
- Max speed
Vehicle management
Never miss the important deadlines for vehicle services, inspections and insurance renewals. The Quartix vehicle tracking system enables you to record all important milestones and reminders.
You simply enter the vehicle odometer reading and key milestones for all your vehicles. The Quartix vehicle tracking system then accumulates the mileage from that date and notifies you when the vehicle needs servicing. Notifications are sent as emails or you can review the whole business vehicle fleet in an online report.
Create your own geographic zones
If your vehicles need to be either in or out of certain areas at defined times, geo-fencing can alert you in real-time if ever those rules are broken. Get started by simply marking out the desired zone on our map with an easy drawing tool. We allow you to have unlimited geo-fence zones.
Define mandatory or prohibited zones
Establish the rules for each zone. In mandatory mode, the vehicles must be inside the defined zone during the designated times; in prohibited mode, they must not enter the zone. For example:
A business owner wants to be sure that employees are not returning home during the working day.
Solution – Designate the driver’s home as a ‘Quartix Named Location: Prohibited Zone’ on weekdays between 8:00 am and 6:00 pm.
A city fleet manager needs to make sure that her vehicles remain within the city boundary at all times.
Solution – Create a geofence around the city and set it as a mandatory zone. Any vehicles that leave the zone will trigger an alert.
Real-time alerts
If the geofencing rules are broken, an alert will be emailed so that the behavior can be investigated and corrected right away, giving you another element of control over your fleet. Alerts are unlimited and are all covered in the cost of the monthly subscription.
"We can simply see mileage and time recordings on the system, rather than asking our drivers to check their dashboards"
Jack Armstrong, Maintenance Manager
SS Landscaping Services
Read more
A company can save a lot of money by examining the routes that a vehicle took in a day and how much time was spent travelling. These key factors, when streamlined, lead to better productivity. And the information is all available to businesses that have installed telematics! Read a selection of vehicle tracking success stories here.
The benefits of vehicle tracking eventually trickle down to a business’s customers:
- More accurate arrival and cost estimates
- Faster emergency response by properly equipped trucks
- More precise billing
What about fleet management?
Telematics technology can do more than just provide real-time tracking; it’s also become equally important in the management of a safe and efficient fleet. The same tracking unit that can provide live location data can also record and deliver the following:
Driver behavior analysis: The unit’s accelerometer reports on the vehicle’s driving style, factoring in speed, acceleration and braking, which are a good indicator of how much risk employees are taking.
Vehicle maintenance alerts: Using telematics and odometer readings, milestones such as inspections, insurance and registration renewals and service due dates can be scheduled, and alerts sent to make sure no vital deadlines are missed.
IFTA calculator: With a tax calculator that is tied into the tracker’s GPS location data and mileage recordings, telematics even makes paying fuel taxes easier for a business owner.
The future of telematics
There is no limit to what will be possible through telematics technology in the future. If the past ten years of growth in the industry are an indication, even more mobile workforces, of all shapes and sizes, will realize the enormous benefits that can be reaped from vehicle tracking.
The capability of a vehicle tracking system is expanding every day, and features that seemed far away only a few years ago are now right around the corner. There has never been a better time to get on board with telematics.
The Quartix difference
We marry the latest GPS technology and mobile communication with a system that can compute real-time events in about 60 microseconds (or 0.00006 seconds) to make your telematics data both accurate and fast. Quartix customers can rely on a system that is user-friendly, cost-effective, and backed by 17 years of operating experience in the telematics and vehicle tracking industry.
View the 8 reasons to choose Quartix.
“When we saw how easy the Quartix system was to use, and how reasonable the cost was, we didn’t need to look any further.”
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