How Can the Best Fleet Management Software Quickly Boost Productivity?

Businesses can choose to operate their in-house fleets or engage the services of a third-party logistics (3PL) provider. Working with a 3PL company can offer more convenience, but running your own fleets will generally give you better control of the delivery experience and often more potential for cost savings. 

If you do decide to manage your own  in-house fleet, you’re going to need the right tools to provide  efficient, visible, scalable deliveries: you're going to need the best fleet tracking software, and the new generation of applications incorporates AI-powered features that do a lot more to increase productivity than just track your trucks.

What Is Fleet Tracking Software?

Fleet management software is a tool that helps businesses coordinate and run last mile delivery operations more smoothly. An advanced solution will help fleets manage processes such as assigning vehicles and drivers, scheduling deliveries, optimizing routes, GPS tracking, and tracking costs. This kind of software helps you manage fleet-related processes in a single application. Plus, the best software can easily be integrated with your company's other enterprise solutions, such as ERPs, CRMs, WMS, and telematics.

Fleet tracking can be a broad term, and it can cover a range of different solutions. Some fleet tracking solutions are closer to telematics software, showing delivery truck locations and data on driver information. Others are more comprehensive and provide functionality for the entire last mile delivery process.

Generally speaking, there's real value to a solution that can help you plan, execute, and track deliveries. But the goal isn't necessarily to find the maximum number of features. Instead, it's to create a technology stack that powers smart, connected processes and strategic data visibility across your operations.

The Benefits of Fleet Tracking Software

Fleet vehicle tracking software enables companies to manage and optimize the processes involved in delivering goods from the warehouse or hub all the way into the customer's door. It can also help you plan and manage your deliveries from end to end—assuming you choose the right solution.

Below are some of the productivity benefits of having this kind of software:

Cost savings

The right solution will offer you robust route planning and optimization tools, which are necessary for reducing driver hours and fuel consumption. This can help you streamline dispatching to ensure that the right driver is assigned to the right job at the right time. The right software should also empower dispatchers and fleet managers to make last-minute adjustments as needed.

To make this possible, your software should automate the processes involved in fleet management in order to cut down the risk of human error. If you can remove manual effort for order data entry, customer communications, delivery alerts, etc., you can save a lot of the time and labor associated with incorrect orders, excessive phone time, and much more. 

With the right solution, you can also achieve cost savings in a host of other ways. For instance, if you can automate delivery communications with customers, you can cut down on call center costs. Likewise, you can reduce labor and fuel costs associated with redelivery attempts if you can improve customer-facing communications and delivery tracking and thereby reduce the number of not-at-homes.

Some solutions also enable cost savings via scheduled maintenance for your vehicles. If you can stay on top of vehicle maintenance, you can lengthen the lifespans of your vehicles and reduce fleet costs.

Improved efficiency

Fleet tracking solutions also enable delivery teams to work more efficiently and ensure consistently high performance. Enterprise-grade truck fleet management system lets you plan and generate complex, multi-stop routes factoring in many variables such as driver availability, fleet capacity, driver skill, and other business constraints. Smart route planning and optimization features enable drivers to complete more deliveries within their shifts and minimize the kinds of mistakes that often happen when using manual route planning methods.

This increase in productivity isn't just limited to one area of the delivery process. When you have connected processes powered by smart solutions you can find new efficiencies in many areas. For instance, you might run what-if scenarios to uncover a more effective way to organize your delivery network to decrease total mileage across delivery runs. Or you might implement real-time delivery tracking for customers so that your customer service team doesn't have to spend as much time fielding inbound where-is-my-order calls.

Deep insights

The best fleet tracking software offers actionable data that's presented in a configurable and easily digestible manner. Your software should allow users to keep track of delivery performance and compare key metrics such as distance traveled, on-time rates, or feedback scores.

Having the right data in the right place at the right time is one of the most powerful things your software can offer. When you have to hunt for the data and analysis you need, it slows down important processes. Conversely, when you can quickly get answers to your questions, you can make continuous improvements in your delivery operations.

Improved driver safety and performance

Software that offers real-time tracking of drivers allows fleet managers to monitor unsafe driving behavior. This enables dispatchers and large fleet managers to communicate directly with drivers to correct bad behavior like harsh braking, as well as to guide them away from road closures, heavy traffic, and other road challenges.

At the same time, the right solution enables greater connectivity between drivers out in the field and the rest of your team. Dispatchers can spot exceptions and reach out to drivers proactively to help resolve them. Drivers can update their statuses in real time with photos and notes to give back-office staff total delivery visibility.

The result of this increased connectivity is that your software effectively empowers you to streamline delivery planning and delivery execution: You execute on your plans more consistently, saving time and delighting your customers in the process.

Improved customer experience

The best last mile tracking software also helps businesses improve customer experience by providing customers with accurate expected times of arrival (ETAs), real-time tracking of orders, and direct communication with drivers and dispatchers. Advanced solutions also have built-in customer feedback capture to help you improve the customer delivery experience.

How to Identify the Best Fleet Tracking Software

Many solutions claim to be the best fleet tracking software on the market—but not all of them actually deliver on their promises. If you’re seriously considering a new fleet management solution, you need to make sure that any potential solution has the capabilities you need to ensure effective fleet management: 

Route optimization

This feature allows you to ditch the error-prone and time-consuming manual route planning process or the legacy route planning processes driven by outmoded software. This helps streamline route planning and enables you to generate the most cost-effective routes by taking into consideration functions such as driver availability, crew skills and history, vehicle capacity, delivery windows, service areas, and real-world conditions.

Be aware that not all route optimization functionality is created equal. Some platforms only offer basic routing as an afterthought. This can put you in a position where the system generates routes that have to be manually massaged before you can actually deploy them.

Look for something that offers route optimization that can handle the complexity of the last mile. This includes configurable parameters as well as things like learned service time estimates for different drivers or job types.

Accurate ETAs

When you can provide customers with accurate delivery times (via software that uses machine learning to predict ETAs based on performance history, vehicle location, and traffic, among other factors), you can bolster customer experience and reduce your number of failed and incomplete deliveries. 

The key to accurate ETAs in modern delivery management is to leverage AI and machine learning. By utilizing these new technologies, the software can learn from completed deliveries and increase in accuracy over time. To make this happen, you need software that can process huge amounts of data without breaking a sweat and convert that information into predictive insights.

Real-time tracking updates

Your fleet management software should allow you to send automatic updates to customers to ensure that they are informed about the status of their orders. Likewise, internal stakeholders should be able to easily see delivery statuses including ETA and driver location at a glance.

This is one of the areas where effective fleet tracking is about more than just GPS coordinates. Knowing the location of a given truck can be valuable. But to put the truck location data in context, you also need driver status updates.You need to know whether a driver is headed to a particular job, on site, finishing a job, or is complete and heading to their next stop.

Delivery metrics

The best fleet tracking software should give you complete visibility into driver performance, service times, success rates, distance traveled as well as other delivery-related metrics and customer satisfaction scores.

Here, the architecture of your platform is extremely important. If you have an all-in-one solution that can handle the entire last mile management and tracking process, the data can live in a single data repository. When all of your data is in one place, it's much easier to analyze. That allows you to generate insights that will help you improve delivery performance. For this kind of delivery intelligence, cloud SaaS software is superior to on-premises legacy solutions.

Proof of delivery

Capturing proof of delivery (POD) digitally helps you track delivery-related data such as location and time of delivery, photos, driver notes, signatures, and more. A solution that offers electronic PoD can help businesses build trust with customers and reduce manual data entry and paperwork, thereby protecting the company from false claims of damage or missing items.

As with so many of the items on this list, connectivity with a driver mobile app is critical. Ideally, your solution will include its own driver mobile app with proof of delivery functionality. This prevents delivery documentation from being isolated in a silo. Ease of use

It can be hard to get employees to use a new tool. Finding a solution that is easy to use will help you implement the software with less resistance. It's best to go with software that provides a simple and easy onboarding experience and can fit seamlessly with your current workflows.

This isn't an issue that just affects implementation. Software that's difficult to use has the potential to slow down processes across the board. When users have to hunt for the information they need, or they have to consult a set of three-ring binders to figure out how to adjust their routes, it slows down planning and makes other delivery management processes less efficient.

The sweet spot is to choose software that combines high functionality with ease of use. You don't want software that's easy to use because it's light-duty and can't handle complex use cases. You also don't want software that requires significant specialized training.

Integration

Choose a software that can be integrated easily and seamlessly with your current software tools. Otherwise back-office teams will wind up doing extra work, since the data from the fleet software solution can't be synced with other solutions. 

This is especially important when you're using different solutions for telematics and last mile logistics. Since delivery tracking and management are closely related, you need total data integration between them. Your telematics data should be easy to access from within your last mile solution and vice versa.

Scalability

Make sure the software you choose will allow you to add drivers, routes, vehicles, and regions easily as you expand your fleet operations. The right software will make it easy to add new service units, and it won't slow down when you're trying to route or track a large number of deliveries.

Finding software that's built to scale can be a challenge. It can be costly and time consuming to scale up on-premise solutions, which often require adding more servers and software updates. Cloud software is generally a better bet, but even there you need to seek out something that has a strong track record of handling large numbers of deliveries without slowing down.

It's worth noting that the ability to scale isn't just about adding on delivery capacity. It's also about the ability to stay agile as your delivery network expands. That means making it easy to track deliveries that are being carried out by external carriers like 3PLs. 

It also means giving you the capabilities to analyze your existing distribution network and make strategic decisions about warehouse/distribution center placement and more. This might involve running what-if scenarios to model potential changes.

The best fleet software offers many benefits. When you find a solution that offers a robust set of features, can be integrated easily, and can support your business as it grows, you will put yourself in a position to outpace your competition with exceptional delivery service.

The right solution will offer you more than the ability to track your deliveries in real time. In addition, it will offer full-lifecycle support for managing your deliveries. To make that happen, look for a solution that integrates easily with your other technology, scales seamlessly, and gives you smart, connected capabilities for everything from routing and dispatching to customer communications and reporting.