Resource Center Squeeze More Value Out of Your Assets

Squeeze More Value Out of Your Assets

August 30, 2021 Lindsay Cagnacci

As any fleet manager knows, your company depends on the durability of your vehicles. Fleet vehicles are an expensive investment, so you want to make sure that they operate at their fullest potential to save you money and keep your business running smoothly. 

Getting your vehicles to last as long as possible can seem like a challenging task. Consider this article an in-depth guide to getting the most out of what you have both now and in the future. Below we will discuss ways you can utilize your telematics system to prolong the life of your assets by keeping up with maintenance, analyzing asset utilization, taking advantage of fleet management reports and systems, and promoting good driving habits.

1. Keep Up With Regular Maintenance

It is necessary to schedule routine maintenance for all of your vehicles to prevent minor issues from becoming more significant events. Our fleet maintenance tracking system makes it easy for fleet managers to keep an eye on maintenance events and stay on top of routine maintenance.

Alerts and reminders for preventive and routine maintenance will help you keep your vehicles running more efficiently for longer. With our maintenance tracking solution, receive texts or emails when vehicles are having an issue or are due for maintenance. You can also customize reminders to trigger based on mileage, time, or engine hours so that you can keep a closer eye on the events that are causing your vehicles to go out of service.  

Field Warrior offers an easy-to-use, FMCSA-compliant DVIR for pre- and post-trip inspections.
Complete driver vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs) digitally with Field Warrior® for Android and approved Garmin devices. It’s quick, simple, and FMCSA compliant.

Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIRs) are helpful to ensure your fleet is in good working order, but they can often be time-consuming. Not anymore. Our customizable electronic DVIR forms allow your drivers to submit pre and post-trip inspections with Field Warrior®, saving them the hassle of manual paperwork. Using their existing smartphone or tablet, drivers send real-time alerts and pictures of defects, highlighting vehicle issues with comments and photos. Once the vehicle is serviced, drivers are notified and asked to confirm that the problem has been resolved, creating a reliable maintenance workflow.

Make sure each of your vehicles receives the proper attention they need so that your assets stay productive longer. Repairing your assets promptly also means less downtime for vehicles, helping you maximize your profits and keep your business moving forward. 

2. Analyze Asset Utilization

How often do you take a close look at the percentage of time you are using all of your assets? Maybe you are trained in this process, or perhaps asset utilization fell off the priority list. It is essential to analyze asset utilization because your business’s success is tied to managing its vehicles. This means that all factors contributing to time loss must be addressed, with a significant issue being vehicle downtime or replacement due to maintenance malfunctions. 

To calculate asset utilization, you take the total number of hours an asset is being used and compare that to the total number of hours available for service. Once you collect the data for each asset, you can analyze that data across your entire fleet. Are you wondering if there is an easier way to track asset utilization efficiently? The answer is yes- and we offer the best solution. 

With IntelliHub®, you can manage and analyze every aspect of your fleet. You can view which vehicles are out of commission, how fast they are going, how long they have been idling, unsafe driver behavior, and more. You want to prolong the life of your vehicles so that your company generates more revenue from its assets. With the help of IntelliHub®, you can easily keep track of the things that make your vehicles unserviceable, losing you both time and money. 

Our IntellHub fleet tracking system provides accurate GPS locations of all assets.
At a glance, the fleet tracking GPS system shows you exactly what your vehicles and drivers are doing, where they are, and where they’re going.

3. Review Fleet Management Reports

Keeping organized records plays a vital role in maintaining the life of your vehicles for an extended period. By keeping track of your assets’ activity, diagnostics, and maintenance summaries, you can more accurately identify operational issues and uncover vehicle inefficiencies.

Improve your fleet vehicles’ performance and productivity with advanced fleet management reports. Our fleet reports collect all of your driver and vehicle data within one easy-to-use system making it simple to analyze each aspect of your fleet. With fleet-wide analytics, you will have the information you need at your fingertips to maximize your vehicle’s efficiencies, especially with maintenance reports that help you keep up with routine maintenance and identify vehicles that may be under-maintained. 

Begin optimizing vehicle utilization by bringing all of your data together in an easy-to-read system. Our fleet reports are designed to help you better understand and enhance the performance of your fleet with historical reports for scheduled stops, idling, and engine hours. That way, you can see where improvement is needed in order to keep your vehicles in tip-top shape.

Aggregated fleet reports provide advanced data insights to make more informed decisions.
Our fleet reporting aggregates all of your vehicle and driver data to help you see the big picture. Fleet management reports are easily viewed online, printed, or exported to a number of different formats.

4. Promote Good Driving Habits

Good driving can extend the life of your vehicles tremendously. That’s why it is crucial to help your drivers become better and safer on the road. With an implemented driver monitoring system, know what is happening with your vehicles and drivers at all times. With FleetCam®, you can see if drivers have been abusing your vehicles by driving recklessly, using a cellphone while behind the wheel, smoking while driving, and much more. 

FleetCam® detects if drivers are harshly accelerating, cornering, or braking- all of which are events that affect the longevity of your fleet vehicles. Drivers who have a habit of riding the brakes can prematurely degrade a vehicle’s brakes and cause damage to the vehicle’s suspension system. Needing to fix your brakes and suspension not only costs you money, time, and business, but it affects the life of your vehicles in the long run. One of the most effective ways to prevent unwanted driving behavior is to notify drivers on the spot when they engage in it. Our real-time in-cab alerts were created to immediately catch a driver’s attention when performing harsh driving events so that they can instantly start to form better driving habits by learning from their mistakes. 

Drivers can achieve better driving habits with our driver behavior and coaching system. This unique system reduces poor driving behavior by training drivers’ intuitions and empowering them to coach themselves while keeping managers informed and in control. When an undesirable event occurs, drivers are notified so that they can review what the event was, when and where it took place, as well as a video clip of the event itself. This way, drivers can learn from their mistakes on their own. However, if driver behavior does not improve with in-cab alerts and self-coaching, drivers are assigned refresher courses to help address negative driving habits. These driver training sessions are an interactive and informative way to highlight facts about road safety that many drivers are not aware of. 

DriveShield empowers drivers to review events and self-coach through training modules.
Drivers can review their events and self-coach by using DriveShield™, an app installed on their phone, or by logging in to the DriveShield™ web portal in a web browser.

You want your vehicles to last through their useful lifespan, so take the necessary steps to ensure that your assets receive the attention they need. Contact us.

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