How to Choose a Commercial Truck GPS Navigation App

When it comes to ensuring successful last mile deliveries, equipping your drivers with the right technology is paramount. But figuring out exactly what that technology should look like can seem daunting. Does every truck need to be equipped with telematics devices? Should all of your drivers have a separate GPS app for trucks? What’s the right balance of technologies?

At the end of the day, the important thing is to think of the technology you’re outfitting your drivers with as part of your larger technology ecosystem and let that guide your decisions. If you’re trying to standardize processes through digitization, that should be your north star when it comes to finding trucking GPS apps. Likewise, if you want to achieve a more connected logistics experience overall, that should be guiding your decisions on the driver mobile app front as well. 

With all that in mind, let’s dive into how trucking GPS apps work, how GPS for truck routes impacts last mile delivery performance, and what delivery businesses need to get out of their routing and navigation for commercial trucks. 

How Do Trucking GPS Apps Work?

At a high level, most trucking GPS apps need to do two things:

• Provide turn-by-turn navigation based on live truck location data
• Maintain a map of streets that are inaccessible to trucks of various sizes for one reason or another

The simplest versions of these apps can be used the way drivers who aren’t in commercial vehicles use Google Maps or Waze. Your phone’s in-built GPS capabilities handle the tracking the application ensures that the commercial vehicle route map is up-to-date and suggests straightforward routes for point a to point b.

If you’re an owner-operator with a truck or two and a pretty straightforward set of routes, you might be able to get by with one of these lighter apps. But even once you’re running a few trucks you start to need something more robust and full-featured. That’s where the right driver mobile app comes in.

GPS for Truck Routes: What You Need to Know

Truck routes are made more complex by low bridges and tunnels, weight restrictions on roads, and other hazards that make it difficult or impossible for trucks to get to a particular place at a particular time. 

But when you’re optimizing truck routes as a delivery organization, those aren’t necessarily your biggest hurdles—at least if your goal is to maximize efficiency and get more out of your fleet capacity. 

From that perspective, commercial truck routes have to deal with:

• Differences in service time between delivery types—which can impact capacity utilization and ETA accuracy
• Meeting customer time window requests without losing out on route efficiency
• Tracking delivery statuses and ETAs in real time over the course of each delivery run 
• Matching the right drivers and vehicles to different jobs or job types
• Balancing the routing needs of recurring orders versus new order (for some businesses)

This means that GPS for truck routes is only one piece of the puzzle. GPS tracking and real-time navigation can provide you with visibility into routes and they unfold, and they can ensure that your drivers are empowered to leverage the quickest feasible routes between two points, but they can’t actually ensure the most optimal sequence of stops for your given parameters. 

That’s why your GPS app for trucks needs to be integrated into a larger last mile delivery solution—one that seamlessly connects planning and execution to ensure delivery efficiency and visibility. 

5 Steps for Choosing a Commercial Truck GPS Navigation App

If your goal is to choose the right commercial truck GPS navigation app, there are a few important steps you should take to ensure you’re adopting a system that will actually improve delivery efficiency and visibility. 

1. Start with a focus on the entire last mile: The trucking GPS apps that drivers use are ultimately a lot more than just tracking devices—they’re lifelines back to the rest of the team. If they’re connected to a last mile delivery solution that helps you optimize the entire process from end-to-end, then you’re setting all of your teams up for success, not just your drivers and other field personnel. 
2. Make sure your route optimization is cutting-edge: Like we said above, commercial vehicle route optimization needs to clear a number of different hurdles to efficiency. Make sure that the backbone of whatever system you adopt can optimize routes in whatever way you need it to—rapidly and efficiently. 
3. Find a GPS app for truckers that works offline: This might seem like a contradiction in terms—but the simple fact is that sometimes your drivers are going to wind up in areas where they lose cell coverage or their devices can’t connect. Whatever application you empower them with ought to be able to cache information locally when that happens and keep collecting data so that the system is able to fill in the gaps and send data back to the dispatching team as soon as the driver is back online. 
4. Ensure that proof of delivery is included: Your drivers have more impressive capabilities on the mobile devices that they already have in their pockets than would have been reasonable to expect even a decade and a half ago. Having a smartphone with a camera is more or less a given for most drivers now, so the best practice is to make sure that they can leverage that technology to capture photographic proof of delivery for every job. This should reside within the mobile app and be immediately transmitted back to dispatchers. This can save huge amounts of time, money, and paperwork. 
5. Prioritize communication and connectivity: Visibility is only as valuable as the actions you’re able to take off the back of it. That’s why it’s not enough for your GPS app to send you live delivery data from out in the field—you also need it to enable live, two-way communication between drivers and dispatchers. Obviously, you don’t want drivers to have to stop what they’re doing in order to call or text about a potential issue with a delivery, so most of the status updates should be either automated or via the push a button. But for cases where the driver really does need to confirm something with a manager or dispatcher, their GPS app for truckers should give them the ability to do that quickly and easily. Likewise, they should be able to receive updates and messages from the rest of the team as needed. 

The Power of GPS Apps for Truckers

The criteria we laid out above might seem like a tall order for any given app, but it suggests just how powerful the right trucking GPS apps can be when they’re implemented the right way. By leveraging a driver mobile application that’s connected with end-to-end last mile logistics capabilities—incluyding intelligent route optimization for commercial vehicles—you can reduce manual paperwork, improve visibility and tracking, and create more connected and efficient processes across the entire delivery chain. 

The result is that you‘re able to reduce delivery costs, improve delivery performance, and get much more out of your fleet. 

Talk to one of our experts today to learn how the right technology can power smarter, more connected, and more cost-efficient last mile delivery and logistics.