Optimizing Your Fleet Management System with Telematics
Imagine if your machines could talk to you. If they could give you detailed progress reports, provide insightful tips, or even let you know when something is wrong. Think of the insights you could obtain, the obstacles you could overcome, and the places your fleet could go.
With telematics, they can. Telematics gives your machine a voice. They can track performance, fuel consumption, machine health, idle time, and more, providing a variety of insights that you can use to optimize your fleet management and become unstoppable—if you know how to listen. Like all modern technology, telematics takes some getting used to, and for fleet managers whose attention is already being pushed to its limits, trying to decipher the full capabilities of telematics can be an overwhelming and time-consuming process.
Having one eye on your fleet and the other on the future, we at Chadwick-BaRoss have been exploring the potential of fleet telematics since its inception. We know how to read them, extract the right data, and implement it into an efficient and effective fleet management. To help you get the most out of your telematics, here are a few quick and easy ways you can use your data to optimize your fleet management.
Proactive Fleet Maintenance Strategies:
Telematics can help reveal subtle trends, changes, and inconsistencies that are the roots of sudden breakdowns and costly repairs. Before, even to the most experienced eye, these issues would go undetected and left to grow, impacting productivity and profits. But now, thanks to the precision monitoring of telematics, you can become aware of performance anomalies and get ahead of the problem. By monitoring everything about your machines, from engine and hydraulic performance to production data and fuel consumption, in real time, you’ll have a better idea of which machines are experiencing issues and when. This helps to eliminate the guesswork and allows you to make more informed decisions, optimize your maintenance strategy, and create a stronger fleet management system.
This can be incredibly beneficial when creating your fleet maintenance schedule. While typically done by hours, your telematics data may reveal that a machine will require maintenance sooner than anticipated. This gives you the opportunity to revisit your schedule, moving service intervals up so that you’re not left a machine down. This can also help reduce the chances of your maintenance crew uncovering any nasty surprises that can put your machine out of commission for an extended—and unexpected—amount of time.
Burning Out Excessive Fuel Use:
Fuel consumption has long been a thorn in the side of fleet managers, but with telematics, you can finally get the upper hand. Having a constant feed into your fleet’s fuel levels not only makes it easier to track but also alerts you to machines using excessive amounts, prompting you to investigate. A great way of doing this is by cross-referencing your fuel data with other touchpoints. If, for example, a machine burning a lot of fuel also reports harsh breaking and excessive acceleration, it may be a sign that you need to speak with its operator. It can even make you aware of excessive idle time, allowing you to correct it before it burns through more gas and cash, further optimizing your fleet management system.
Getting the Most Bang For Your Buck:
Speaking of minimizing costs, telematics can be an indispensable fleet management resource for budgeting. One piece of data your telematics system constantly tracks and records is a machine’s total operating hours. With this information, you’ll know which machines will be most used, where you could benefit from an acquisition, and which machines can be sold. It will also let you know if you should buy new or if you can get away with buying used or even leasing, ensuring you get the best ROI possible.
Based on these hours, your telematics can produce an estimate for the following year, which can help you determine fuel and maintenance costs. For example, it may estimate that your excavator will see 2000 total operational hours in the coming year. This means that if you typically perform maintenance every 500 hours, you’ll need to budget for at least four maintenance checks. Of course, things can change as the year progresses. But having a better idea of how much you’ll be spending may cause you to revisit your profit margins. This can, in turn, affect your bidding structure and the types of jobs you take on. By utilizing your telematics data, you can plan for all this in advance, building the momentum to take your business to new heights.
Knowing Where Your Machines Are:
Logistics is the air traffic control of fleet management. It controls all in-going and outgoing movement and ensures the right machine gets to the right job. Fleet management tracking is a standard telematic function that has long been used to aid fleet managers. However, there are other ways it can be utilized to optimize your logistics. One of those ways is through streamlined route planning. Let’s say you have two excavators on two job sites, and one needs to be moved to a third. Referring to your telematics data, you can determine which machine is closer, minimizing travel time and getting it on site sooner. This can be incredibly beneficial for a growing business starting to take on more jobs that may not have the logistical experience to do it efficiently.
It can also help you manage the number of on-site machines and ensure that every machine is used effectively. This is where that idle time data can come in handy because now you know which machines can be moved. Since your telematics can also monitor productivity, it can let you know where those machines will get the most use, creating a comprehensive performance-driven ecosystem across all sites, increasing profits, and opening up greater opportunities.
How Chadwick-BaRoss Can Make You Unstoppable:
This is only the tip of the telematics iceberg. When used to its full potential, telematics can help you overcome obstacles, discover new revenue streams, and take your business to innovative new heights. But sifting through all that data can be an overwhelming and time-consuming process…unless you have an experienced telematics partner by your side. One with the knowledge, tools, and insights to decipher the data and unlock its power to provide fleet management solutions that drive productivity, performance, and profits. A partner like Chadwick-BaRoss.
Making Sense of Big Data:
As telematics advances, so does the quality and quantity of the data it collects. Now multiply that by the number of machines you have, and you quickly find yourself overwhelmed with an abundance of data. Data that, if you have a mixed fleet, is being sent to different web portals, presented in different ways, and generating more stress than it’s relieving. We know how to make sense of your telematics data. The specialists at Chadwick-BaRoss have been analyzing and interpreting telematics data for thousands of machines across multiple brands for various industries since day one. We know how to unlock the potential hidden within your telematics, translating it into valuable insights and actionable solutions. We can even focus your telematics, so you only receive information relevant to your KPIs, making it more accessible and easier to implement into your fleet management system.
Enhanced Machine Maintenance & Service:
In addition to optimizing fleet maintenance, telematics data can also help to ensure you stay up and running on the job. While your telematics device will send you alerts when it detects an abnormality, it won’t always give you the cause. However, having monitored the telematics of thousands of machines, we’ve seen almost every alert, error code, and abnormality. We know what they mean and the most common causes, granting us the ability to run full diagnostics before we even set foot on the job site . That means when we arrive on-site, we’re coming fully prepared with a comprehensive plan of attack and any parts we may need to get you up and running as quickly as possible. Before, this would take multiple trips, racking up downtime and eating into your bottom line by the minute. Now, by combining the insights of telematics with the experience of our trained technicians, we can expedite the process, getting you back to work faster so that nothing stands in your way.
Remote Access and Diagnostics:
Sometimes we can even save you a trip altogether. Often a fleet manager will call their service provider out to a job site only to discover all they needed to do was restart the system or top up their fluids. By running remote diagnostics using your telematics, we can often determine the full extent of the issue and whether it can be solved with a phone call. If that’s the case, we’ll walk you through the entire process step-by-step, explaining clearly what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. This can save you time and money, help you get better acquainted with your machines, and allow you to troubleshoot similar issues in the future.
This remote access also lets us immediately locate all your equipment come service time. So, rather than spending countless hours trying to contact a supervisor or fleet managers to find a machine, we simply log into your telematic web portal and get its precise location through GPS telematics. We then cross-reference this information with where our service trucks are in the field to create highly efficient and effective fleet management solutions. This allows you to confidently dedicate yourself to the job at hand, knowing your machines are being well taken care of.
The use of telematic data is just one way that modern technology is reshaping the possibilities of our industry. At Chadwick-BaRoss, we’re harnessing its full power to create innovative fleet management services and solutions capable of removing obstacles and driving you into the future. Contact us to see how.