Making Fleet Management Easier by Tracking Driver Activities Rastrac Team | Mar 29, 2016 10:13:58 AM

The work of a fleet manager is never quite over. There are always new tasks to tackle, reports to file, maintenance to authorize, and vehicle acquisitions to make. With a huge task like managing your organization’s fleet of vehicles, it’s important to find ways to make the job easier when possible.

One of the most important aspects of fleet management is dealing with vehicle drivers. Your drivers are sometimes entrusted with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, and their behaviors have a direct impact on your bottom line.

However, controlling driver behaviors on the job is, traditionally, a difficult job at best. Without some means of directly monitoring drivers on the job, your only information about how your drivers behave behind the wheel comes from the rare third-party report (e.g. the “how’s my driving?” phone number some trucks might have), or from inferences based on times that the driver left one destination and arrived at the next, combined with fuel receipts.

Thankfully, GPS fleet tracking technology now provides for an easy way to track driver activities and improve your fleet management capabilities.

How do GPS vehicle tracking systems make it easier to track and control driver activities?

Here are a few ways:

Accurate, Verifiable Driver Activity Reports

With the use of basic GPS vehicle tracking, you can readily trace the location of each GPS-tagged vehicle in your fleet on a moment’s notice. Using GPS-integrated fleet management software takes things a step further by allowing you to log driver activities and create comprehensive reports based on recorded data.

GPS fleet management software can record driver statistics on a turn-by-turn basis, monitoring:

• Start times
• Acceleration, deceleration, and idle time
• Adherence to routes
• Turning habits
• Arrival time for each destination

Logging all of this information tells you a lot about a driver’s skill set and adherence to safety guidelines. It can also show you where a driver could be doing better, giving you an opportunity to improve that driver’s efficiency behind the wheel.

For example, if you notice that a driver is constantly accelerating and then braking too hard, you can notify the driver of the issue, get an explanation, and correct the behavior. Doing so can save not only gas that would be burned during rapid acceleration, it can spare some excess wear and tear to the vehicle’s suspension, wheels, and brakes.

Real-Time Event Alerts

Modern GPS tracking devices can do more than just provide the location of a vehicle. Advanced GPS monitoring devices can provide critical statistical information about a vehicle’s performance, and can even provide event alerts for vehicle shutdowns, failures, and even crashes.

Such real-time event alerts can add some peace of mind for your fleet management by ensuring you know ASAP if something happens to one of your fleet vehicles.

For example, say that a vehicle gets into a collision. Normally, you’d have to rely on the driver, or the authorities, to notify you of the crash. However, with GPS monitoring, you can get an incident alert right away, allowing you to contact the driver for a status update, or even contact emergency aid services to minimize the time the driver spends waiting for help.

Alternatively, you can set alerts for when vehicles stray from their assigned routes/operational areas. This can help prevent the theft of fleet vehicles by notifying you immediately when a vehicle goes off the reservation and allowing you to engage a remote shutdown of the vehicle.

This makes it easier to manage your fleet vehicles, protecting your assets in the field.

Overall, GPS fleet tracking software and equipment can make the task of managing a fleet of vehicles much easier. Learn more about how GPS fleet tracking can help you today!