“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. It may be a cliché, but its wisdom cannot be understated, especially for business owners and logistics managers. Poor planning of logistics can lead to missed deadlines, unnecessary business expenditures, and unhappy customers. If your business depends on your fleet of vehicles, investing in smart telematics logistic softwares can help you overcome the risks of poor planning, and can wind up saving your business more in the long term, despite the initial cost.

Telematics is similar to the ‘black box’ concept that insurance companies use, but is much more complex. Here, we’ll highlight just some of the ways smart fleet management for logistics can reduce business expenditure, and increase your revenue.

Monitoring driver efficiency can help to reduce fuel spend

In some cases investing in fleet management for logistics can work to drive your return on investment by reducing fuel expenditure. For example, Movolytics’ patented software monitors driver behaviour by gathering real-time data straight from the vehicle’s engine. It then delivers this information in reports and dashboards, highlighting any inefficient behaviours like staying in the wrong gear, harsh braking and aggressive acceleration.

All of these behaviours result in excessive fuel usage, so encouraging drivers to adopt better driving behaviours can help to reduce wastage. Cutting bad driving behaviours can save up to 33% of weekly fuel bills, per vehicle.

Idle time can be reduced with live traffic updates

Sitting in standstill traffic not only wastes fuel, but also emits harmful CO2 emissions into the atmosphere if the engine is left running. It’s recommended that you turn your engine off if you’re going to be idling for more than a minute. With telematics, that needn’t be a problem. Telematics systems can also work to reduce idling by providing drivers with real-time traffic updates, while offering alternative routes to help avoid traffic jams and congestion.

Beating the traffic can also work to ensure that drivers complete their jobs or deliveries in as little time as possible, which can maximise how much business your company can handle in a single day.

Telematics systems can also offer you and your clients a real-time update on where drivers are located, helping to boost customer satisfaction and boosting your brand reputation. Happy customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, and are also more likely to recommend the brand to friends and family, creating new avenues of revenue for your business.

Fleet maintenance reduces any costly downtime

Fleet maintenance can make or break your business. Just one vehicle out of action could result in delays and cancellations of services across the company. There are of course financial implications to this. Not only will you need to pay out for the repair costs of broken down vehicles, but you will also be losing out on business while the vehicle is out of action.

With this in mind, it’s important to regularly check and maintain your vehicles, ensuring they’re working at their most efficient and cost effective levels, and preventing any costly repairs from being needed. Fleet telematics systems provide maintenance alerts, flagging up any issues or reminding drivers when services are due. This can help prevent a business facing any of the costs associated with broken down vehicles.

While fleet management and smart logistics systems may seem like a costly investment to make for your business, the return on investment can be huge through cutting fuel costs, improving customer service or helping to maintain vehicles.