Whether it’s to source supplies or deliver products on time, well-maintained transport systems are critical to businesses. Powerful technological advancements have now made managing fleets and tracking their drivers’ conduct easier than ever before. This article aims to explore the synergistic benefits of a fleet dash cam with a GPS tracking system with intelligent sensors.
Features of Fleet Management and Tracking Systems
Tracking vehicles goes beyond checking for locations. State-of-the-art technologies now offer many sophisticated features for commercial vehicle tracking and driver monitoring to allow us powerful fleet management. Some of the most common features of fleet management and tracking systems are explored below.
1. Multi-Camera Systems
Advanced solutions now allow an almost 360° view from the vehicle, making sure to capture data continuously. Though the usefulness of front-facing cameras is undebatable, the importance of an in-cab camera is now being highlighted as well. The outward-facing cameras track lane departures, following distances, and collisions while a camera facing towards the driver monitors the driver’s fatigue level and drowsiness. Accidents can be stopped in their tracks as both drivers and fleet managers are notified of risky practices. Dangerous practices like not wearing a seatbelt, using a cell phone, smoking, or consuming alcohol will also be reduced when drivers know they are being recorded. In the case of the occurrence of an incident, the data 10 seconds before and after the incident is sent to the cloud for immediate viewing after specific sensors are triggered.
2. Intelligent Sensors
Fleet monitoring systems now come with inbuilt intelligent sensors that use camera and motion input to recognize fatigue, distraction, and recklessness. Audible in-cab alerts call the driver back to focus when such behavior is detected, and fleet managers receive notifications. Tracking driver behavior further helps with driver coaching and enables you to demonstrate to them precisely what they need to work upon.
3. Cloud Storage
Past incidents can come to light anytime, so it is necessary to have access to evidence-based records that date back to a reasonable length of time. In addition, having access to videos further helps managers to maintain performance records and review and adjust internal training. High-quality videos can also aid you in improving the general training of your drivers by enabling you to provide them with analyses of poor and exemplary driving videos.
4. Tracking
GPS tracking systems are gaining popularity amongst fleets because they streamline fleet management significantly. Advanced GPS systems enable real-time and historical tracking of vehicle movements. It allows fleet managers to assign vehicles to jobs depending on their proximity to the service area, effectively increasing the speed of their services. Real-time location tracking can let managers check for the exact locations of their fleet’s members to make sure everyone is at authorized places. This supervision tellingly mitigates chances of idling, exploiting vehicles for personal use, and fraud. On the other hand, having access to historical data allows analysis of past routes, further allowing oversight over vehicle movements and identifying the most efficient routes for the fleet.
5. Recording Driver Time
Driving times can be tracked and recorded to manage drivers’ on-duty status through GPS systems. Moreover, GPS can confirm the arrival time at customer sites, and automated reporting can be used to eliminate the need to maintain driving logs manually.
Benefits of A Dash Cam with Fleet GPS Tracking
The features of such solutions are game-changing in managing transport systems. The benefits a dash cam with fleet GPS tracking offers can further let you derive cost and time savings, effectively improving the efficiency of your operations. Let’s analyze these systems for the benefits of a dash cam for fleet vehicles.
1. Enhanced Driver Safety
Ensuring safe working conditions for employees must be among the top priorities of businesses. Fleet dash camera systems ascertain the safety of your drivers in several ways. As smart in-cab cameras recognize signs of exhaustion and launch audible alerts, your driver can be called back to focus to either pull up or rest or inform you of their condition and get off duty for the day. Having a 360-degree record of the surroundings further ensures that you can protect your drivers with solid evidence in case of wrongful accusations made by other parties after accidents. This lets your company prove its dedication to its values.
2. Improved Vehicle Safety
As drivers can be expected to stay alert when they know they are being monitored, they will avoid reckless behavior and drive safer, effectively decreasing the chances of inflicting excessive wear and tear on your fleet vehicles. In addition, the improved training you will be able to provide them after having access to driving footage will also ensure that your drivers drive most safely, further reducing the risk of damage to the vehicles.
3. Reduced Idle Time
GPS tracking and live footage monitoring let you keep a close eye on the movement of vehicles; drivers realize this and avoid idling. It ensures increased productivity and speeds up delivery processes, allowing you to ensure faster service and cut labor costs associated with extra time spent on the job.
4. Enabling Efficient Routing
Efficiency in operations is key to the profitable working of a business. Having the location of each of your fleet’s vehicles integrated within maps lets you choose the quickest and safest routes for standard routine operations. You can further ensure that your employees follow the shortest routes on their own as well. All this allows substantial time savings by speeding up the process and cost savings by reducing fuel, labor time, and vehicle wear and tear.
5. Improved Customer Service
Having drivers under monitoring lets them be on their best behavior. This, combined with fast service through efficient routing and a maintained record of the time of arrival at customer sites, ensures that your customer service stays on top. In addition, any complaints made by customers can be analyzed against video evidence as well, allowing proper measures to be taken quickly to make up for the wronged party.
6. Decreased Risks of Fraud
Monitoring keeps fraudsters on their toes. Increased driver accountability enabled by constant surveillance and historical record maintenance will fortify your business against fraudulent activities. A business can eliminate the risk of activities like scammer attempts of crashing against commercial vehicles on purpose to get money out of lawsuits against large corporations entirely as well.
7. Quick Response to Vehicles Breaking Down
As GPS integrated systems will allow you to have your vehicles’ exact location, you can dispatch technical help as soon as the driver requests mechanical or technical assistance. Along with saving time and helping with quick deliveries to customers, this feature lets you ensure that your drivers do not get stranded in inhospitable landscapes, allowing you to strengthen further the security you provide to your employees.
8. Ease of Driver Training and Performance Tracking
Automated systems let you track performances easily, down to minute drivers’ habits that need correction. However, drivers themselves can discover areas of self-improvement through features such as post-incident analysis. In addition, other than providing recorded data, specific advanced systems can further be programmed to show the maximum speed attained by individual drivers, the number of drivers idling for longer than a specified period, etc. These reports can be received through email the next day, allowing you an advanced oversight over your operations.
9. Insurance Facilitation
Insurance providers will likely offer discounted packages if you have fleet dash camera systems installed: they recognize the savings obtained from fraud and risk mitigation. This technology can further let you process your insurance swiftly in case of accidents. As insurance claims need strong evidence for their processing to begin, having videos of accidents can get your claims approved and processed without unnecessary delays.
10. Ease of Defense Against Unfair Charges
Large vehicles are hard to control. Due to this size of fleet vehicles, companies usually have to face an intense defense in case of accidents, even if their fleet vehicle was not the one at fault. Having access to footage of incidents can enable legal battles to get sorted out swiftly, eliminating the chances of paying unfair fines.
11. Safer Community
When you hold your fleet to a high standard of safe driving, you ultimately ensure that no one across communities gets harmed. By ensuring accountability in your business’s operations, you play your part in making your surroundings safer and healthier.
Endnote
It can be clearly inferred that integrating technology into fleet management enables better performance. For example, research conducted on 1,200 U.S. mobile-business professionals revealed that 45% of them started receiving positive returns on their investment in less than eleven months after employing fleet management solutions. The substantial cost and time savings such solutions enable can let you make your business as efficient as possible. Such advantages are necessary to ensure survival in today’s increasingly competitive markets, so you should not delay investing in sophisticated vehicle monitoring systems.
