One of fleet management’s most important roles is managing vehicle drivers. Drivers are often entrusted with valuable equipment and cargo and their behaviors have a direct impact on your revenue and customer satisfaction rate.
While ensuring driver accountability is a necessary task, it can certainly be a difficult one. Unless you’re able to physically be in every single vehicle with every single driver (which you obviously aren’t), accurately and directly monitoring your drivers can feel like a near impossible feat.
Thankfully, fleet management can now rely on modern GPS tracking tools and technology to help them keep better track of their fleets—ultimately enhancing driver accountability. Here are three major ways how!
Access the Real-Time Location of Your Drivers
GPS tracking software allows you to pinpoint the exact location of any vehicle in your fleet. This enhances driver accountability by allowing fleet management to accurately see where all of their drivers have been, as well as the route they are currently on. This way, you’ll know if your drivers are adhering to the optimal routes and service schedule you’ve built for them. You’ll be quickly and easily able to identify if your drivers are going off-route (which can increase fuel costs and decrease efficiency), missing service appointments, or using your vehicles for personal use during work house.
For these reasons, GPS tracking makes it possible to keep your drivers accountable—even when fleet management isn’t in the vehicle with them. You can effectively monitor their location remotely from any location! Not only does this help you keep drivers accountable in real-time—data from a GPS tracking device also provides an impartial, verifiable record of all the routes a driver has taken and the locations they’ve visited. This way, if there’s a dispute or discrepancy after the fact, you can go back and refer to records rather than dealing with a “he-said-she-said” situation with your driver.
Monitor Your Fleet’s Driving Habits
If your drivers are practicing unsafe driving habits, it doesn’t just put them at risk—it also risks the safety of other drivers and passengers on the road, pedestrians, your vehicles, and the valuable cargo they carry. Therefore, it’s important that you’re also holding your driver's accountable when it comes to following safe driving practices—which is where our asset tracking solutions can help. With GPS tracking tools, you’ll have concrete data that can be used to keep your drivers accountable for their habits while operating your fleet vehicles.
With RastracGo, our portable fleet tracking device, you’ll have access to data such as acceleration and deceleration rates and turning habits for each vehicle. This allows you to track not only where your vehicle is, but how it is being driven.
The LMU-3035, another of our GPS tracking products, is ideal for managing driver behavior because it alerts fleet management if there is an instance of harsh braking, hard turning, or rapid acceleration.
RastracView, our newest GPS tracking and fleet safety app, can even turn your driver’s smartphone into a collision avoidance system—then share a safety score for each trip and comprehensive “report card” with fleet management so you can monitor your driver’s habits with ease.
Stay in Contact With Your Drivers in the Field
The biggest obstacle to conducting effective fleet management and ensuring driver accountability is often the fact that managers aren’t actually with their drivers. However, GPS tracking and asset management tools make it possible to stay in contact with your drivers throughout the day—even though they’re on the road and you’re in the office or monitoring operations remotely.
How? Our PocketRastrac solution transforms your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone/table into a GPS tracking platform complete with reporting based on time, distance, speed, and turn detect—plus secure, two-way messaging capabilities. This means you can not only track the positions of your drivers in the field, but also communicate with them in real-time. You can send messages back and forth, or have employees send statuses (such as ‘Clocking In’ or ‘Taking a Break’) so you always know what is going on in the field. You’re even able to set the app to only report during work hours, allowing you to enhance driver accountability without your employees feeling like you’re spying on them when they’re off the clock.
Overall, GPS tracking software can make the task of fleet management much easier and keep your drivers accountable for their behaviors and habits while on the job! If you want to learn more about our fleet management solutions or are ready to implement GPS tracking in your fleet today, reach out to a Rastrac expert!
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