These days, municipal fleet budgets continue to be stretched thin while responsibilities to the community stay consistent or even increase in intensity. It’s more important than ever to deliver great quality service to your community with the most efficiency possible, but there are certain challenges unique to municipalities that need to be addressed in order for that to happen. That’s where Rastrac’s StreetComplete telematics software comes into play; our solutions can optimize your municipal fleet’s operations like never before so you can make the most of your tight budget and deliver on high expectations.
Quick Links:
- What Is a Municipal Fleet?
- 4 Challenges for Municipal Fleets
- What Is StreetComplete?
- 4 Solutions for Municipal Fleets with StreetComplete
What Is a Municipal Fleet?
Municipal fleets provide a variety of services to boroughs, cities, communities, and towns all across the country via public service vehicles and employees. These services might include utility workers, emergency responders, police officers, snowplow operators, sanitation services, street sweeper trucks, and more. For whatever municipal service is required by your community, there’s a municipal fleet to deliver it.
4 Challenges for Municipal Fleets
If you’re a municipal fleet manager, the following pain points might haunt your operations and leave you wondering if there’s a better way:
Managing Extreme Weather Hazards
When a blizzard hits your community, shutting down its streets for days at a time while the weather hits isn’t an option. Your citizens need to be able to move through your city in spite of the snow—so efficient snow plow operations are essential. One particular challenge is ensuring routes are plowed in a timely manner without unintentional overlaps or leaving important routes unattended for too long. Alternatively, street sweeper trucks are essential for helping to clean streets up after severe weather, like hurricanes or tornadoes, moves through the area.
Uneven Police Coverage
A critical challenge to municipal fleet managers who work with patrol cars is knowing how frequently the city is patrolled. It’s important that you maintain equal coverage of your community without overwhelming one area more than another, or unintentionally avoiding streets. This goes hand-in-hand with other police fleet concerns like tracking exact locations, maintaining transparency with the community, and ensuring the members of your city are kept safe.
Inefficient Routes and Overall Operations
Are your fleet vehicles crisscrossing all over your city instead of working in a methodical manner? Inefficient routes and ineffective operations lead to extra fuel consumption, accelerated maintenance schedules, and lost time that could be spent on other tasks. Every fleet manager shares these concerns and wants to overcome them with their fleet so they can save time, money, and stress!
Unknown Servicing Times
If your current method for tracking when routes were last serviced is to individually ask your employees and rely on their memory, then you might be missing accurate information or not getting the full story simply due to the human memory. This, of course, leads to routes not being redone or addressed in a timely manner or routes being forgotten entirely simply due to a lack of accurate tracking information.
What Is StreetComplete?
Brought to you by the GPS tracking leaders, Rastrac, our StreetComplete telematics solution tracks vehicles to empower municipalities—and other organizations—to monitor a determined service area so as to best deliver quality services. A key benefit to this technology is the ability to color-code street maps in order to let fleet managers visually track which streets have been serviced recently and which ones still need attention.
Municipal fleet managers can customize the color key in the StreetComplete fleet tracking software to suit their needs and preferences; the maps also “age out” after an established period of time, so fleet managers can know when parts of their community need to be serviced again. For example, you could set the software to display green for streets that have been serviced in the last 15 minutes, yellow for ones that were completed between 16 and 40 minutes ago, red for streets that haven’t been patrolled between 41 and 60 minutes ago, and beyond. Overall, StreetComplete is a powerful tool that can be leveraged to optimize operations, save resources, and streamline your municipal fleet.
4 Solutions for Municipal Fleets with StreetComplete
For each challenge common to the role of municipal fleet manager, StreetComplete has a solution to significantly help, including:
Strategically Combat Severe Weather
With StreetComplete for your snowplows or street sweepers, combatting natural disasters or significant weather events can be handled in a manner that is thorough and effective. You won’t have to worry about parts of your city being neglected in clearing streets because StreetComplete shows a real-time map of exact vehicle locations and times out how frequently each part of your city needs to be serviced. This helps the members of your community move through the city and recover from extreme weather conditions.
Effective Police Operations
GPS tracking for police fleets can provide a multitude of benefits, including more effective dispatching with exact vehicle locations, faster response times, and even coverage across your municipality. StreetComplete helps your police fleet serve your community effectively and efficiently with real-time tracking and optimized routes.
Streamlined Routes to Save on Time, Fuel, and Maintenance
A huge benefit to StreetComplete is the ability to redefine your entire municipal fleet’s performance and each individual fleet vehicle’s contribution to servicing your community. Budgets are crunched down every year so municipal fleet managers need to get the maximum productivity possible from each fleet vehicle—and StreetComplete can help make that happen. With optimized routes that save on fuel, time, and avoid accelerated maintenance needs, StreetComplete helps your municipal fleet do the most while costing the least.
Real-Time and Aged-Out Route Completion Times
As a municipal fleet manager, a huge frustration can come from not knowing when routes were last serviced since that’s kind of the whole point of your fleet’s operations. Rastrac’s StreetComplete software ensures you’re never in the dark about when routes were last serviced, nor will you have to rely on your driver’s memory about when they last completed their route. This saves you time and prevents headaches!
Ready to transform your municipal’s fleet operations with Rastrac’s StreetComplete?
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