Selecting the Correct Telematics Provider

Adding telematics could save fuel, cut maintenance costs, reduce insurance premiums and improve driver safety. The below ‘tips’ are designed to help you get the most out of your fleet.

1. Define your goals: Clearly identify your goals at the outset. What are you looking to achieve? This could be a mixture of Cost Reduction, Risk Reduction & Improved Efficiency. 

2. Design your system: Working with the telematics supplier, you should decide the best way to implement your scheme and the level and type of data you want to identify. 

3. Talk to your insurers: Evidence that you are taking steps to monitor driving behaviours and introduce safer driving practices. 

4. Communicate with your drivers: Involve your employee groups as early as possible and explain why you are introducing your policies. often it is to help protect them on the roads.

5. Create reasonable policies: Formally picking up every single overspeed with a driver will create friction not to mention the administration for you. Concentrate on your goals and start with the worst behaviours.

6. Baseline your performance: Do this at the start and then on an ongoing basis. This will help you track and prove the value of your investment.

7. Use exception reporting: Telematics must be practical for your organisation. Vast amounts of raw date will be produced, so it is key to design your system to ignore all but the most important data required. 

8. Follow-up on the data: Whilst you may see an initial improvement just from implementing a policy, drivers will soon recognise this and revert to old habits.

9. Reward good behaviour: Rewarding good driver performance and improved performance can be just as effective as punishing bad behaviour.

10. Preventative maintenance: Proactively booking in your vehicles for service or receiving early warnings alerts on your vehicles could allow a part to be replaced before it goes wrong, thus preventing serious damage to the engine. 

11. Vehicle utilisation: How many vehicles do you need and how often are they being used? Review your fleet usage to ensure your vehicle deployment is correct.

12. Fuel usage monitoring: Identifying inefficient driving practices, such as drivers idling or frequently accelerate and decelerate harshly can make a huge difference. 

13. Driver safety: By monitoring driver behaviour, telematics systems when used correctly can help you educate and improve drivers or even give you a priority list for classroom or in-cab driver training.

14. Vehicle selection: Evaluate your vehicles for appropriateness to your needs. Continuous monitoring will help to pinpoint the most cost-effective vehicles for each individual and working role.

Continuous improvement: Don’t settle when you achieve your initial objectives, adopt a continuous improvement methodology to fleet improvement, the technology will help you re-evaluate the goalposts.