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Today’s drivers are increasingly comfortable with telematics and other in-vehicle technologies—like GPS, driver assistance systems, and real-time diagnostics—that are now standard in many vehicles. For operators of large fleets and heavy machinery, these tools are becoming not just helpful, but essential for improving safety, efficiency, and overall performance. Vendors and solution providers have been finding creative ways to utilize the wellspring of real-time data from onboard computers, in-cab smart tools, and other wireless automotive technology to develop new forms of fleet efficiency and optimization never before possible. That has meant the creation of new best practices for operators to prioritize safety, new strategies for meeting client demands faster, new ways to keep vehicles functional longer, and more, all based on data. That, in a nutshell, is telematics.
Maybe you’ve heard of telematics and thought it sounded promising, but decided that cutting-edge telematics solutions were too big an investment for your fleet. This is something worth rethinking, because telematics ROI is more than just substantial. Telematics deployments don’t just pay for themselves, but ultimately bring huge net gains. If anything, telematics is becoming something Canadian fleet operators can’t afford not to use. The Cost of Ignoring (COI) on telematics is high, meaning that if you neglect taking the steps to assure a more safe and efficient fleet, i.e., deploying a telematics solution, it will end up costing you.
Deploying a Canada-based telematics platform like Geotab via a localized provider like DiCAN can reduce fleet costs through drastically improving fleet safety, compliance, and operational efficiency in the long run. Here’s how.
The Real Savings You Get With Telematics
A telematics platform can save you money in the following ways:
Reducing fuel consumption through route optimization
Backtracking, hitting construction, encountering traffic bottlenecks, and other route interruptions lead to vehicles burning fuel, thereby burning money. Telematics uses a combination of GPS and AI to make sure that every vehicle in your fleet has down-to-the-second guidance on the most effective route to a destination. This kind of optimization leads to big fuel savings and helps your fleet meet environmental sustainability goals.
Enabling predictive maintenance
Vehicle fleet owners know that an ounce of prevention goes a long way towards keeping heavy machines in working order. With telematics-based predictive maintenance, data streamed from vehicles and their components about performance and usage give early warning that a failure is on the way. This lets you catch problems very early, resulting in maintenance cost reduction. It also cuts out the downtime, operational disruption, and strategic upheaval of having a vehicle malfunction or die while in service.
Improving resource planning and staff efficiency
Real-time data on the health of your vehicles doesn’t just let you maintain them, it lets you deploy them, and the staff that drive them, more intentionally and strategically, enabling everyone to get the job done faster and better.
Reducing accidents and insurance claims by improving driving behavior
Having a way to track how vehicle operators drive and immediately identify red flags lets a fleet owner incentivize good driving and penalize dangerous driving.
As you’ll see in the next section, this advantage is particularly important to any fleet and its ability to operate profitably.
Why it Pays to be Safe
Safety should be every fleet’s top priority, naturally, as when it comes to heavy machinery, absolutely nobody wants an accident. But the established benefits of developing a culture of safety go beyond the obvious injury prevention and the personal well-being of operators, clients, and customers. Safety incidents lead to insurance claims, increased insurance costs, and possible legal expenses. They take employees out of work and take vehicles out of service. They can damage product and destroy morale. All of these things have a big cost attached.
With telematics, you can get a readout of what choices your drivers are making at the wheel, and provide coaching to show your drivers where they’re making little mistakes that can have huge ramifications. By preventing accidents, you negate having to absorb all the costs that come with them. A telematics solution like Geotab and DiCAN can serve as the foundation of your safety culture, so you can bring the number of accidents as close to zero as possible.
Enhance Any Fleet’s Performance With Telematics
The benefits of using telematics are inarguable for safety, compliance, sustainability, and fleet efficiency, and all of these double as advantages to your bottom line. And as the technology develops, you’re sure to see even more benefits as the unique, data-driven innovations keep coming.
If you want to get started seeing the ROI as soon as possible, see about booking a Geotab telematics trial that will let you and you see just how much you’ll save with telematics before you start paying.