Many modern transport organizations would now shudder to think how they could operate without real-time visibility of their fleet, vehicle, and customer performance!
Fleet analytics is about using digital data to provide dispatchers and managers with data-driven detailed insights into their fleet and operations. It is crucial in making informed decisions about your end-to-end supply chain.
Fleet analytics using specialized software has become more popular over the last decade as modern carriers and enterprises have adopted telematics and digitized TMS systems. In recent years, as telematics and TMS platforms have integrated, even more meaningful fleet analytics have become readily available.
Historically fleet analytics gave you a basic level of information on your truck and fleet performance. Now sophisticated Transport Management Systems such as M2X provide fleet analytics from within their next generation cloud-based platforms; this allows you to visualize and analyse information in a much better way than with previous technology. Showing live real-time information such as
- Carbon emissions by customer, job and fleet
- Predicted cost to operate per truck
- Profitability of customers, jobs and daily schedules
Fleet analytics is helpful in providing insights into many areas of your transport business. These include:
- Cost optimization: Using specific analysis tools, fleet analytics can provide insight into which customers, dispatchers and trucks are optimized most effectively. This insight is crucial in pricing new jobs, training dispatchers and making capital investment decisions.
- Route optimization: Fleet analytics can analyze historical data and compare it to real-time information. By identifying the most efficient routes and circuits, businesses can minimize fuel consumption, reduce vehicle wear and tear, and decrease overall operating costs.
- Asset utilization : Fleet analytics can monitor the utilization of each vehicle within the fleet. By identifying under utilized vehicles or excessive idle time, businesses can make informed decisions about fleet size, vehicle allocation and potentially reduce the number of vehicles required. This optimization can lead to cost savings in vehicle acquisition, maintenance, insurance, and other related expenses.
Fleet Analytics: Limitations and Risks
In depth fleet analytics is incredibly powerful and central to making informed decisions. However, relying on fleet analytics has limitations and risks:
- Data quality: The accuracy and completeness of data is critical and often relies on multiple sources of information.
- Data Integration: Fleet data is often spread across multiple systems and sources, making integration crucial to its usability.
- Data privacy and security: Fleet data often includes sensitive information, such as vehicle location, vehicle costs, and customer information, which must be protected from unauthorized access.
- Complexity of analysis: Fleet analytics requires complex algorithms and models to analyze large volumes of data. These need to be accurate and well understood. While we believe that fleet analytics is a tool that should be used regularly, the team reviewing the analytics should understand how the data is pulled together and the operational processes used to obtain the data.
Using software to analyze your supply chain ensures you are capturing real-time information and are able to analyze and report specific information for all aspects of your business. Dispatchers, maintenance staff, and your accounts team will all benefit from understanding your fleet analytics. One of the most significant impacts fleet analytics will have on your operations is the ability to provide excellent customer service and to work with your partners on areas of improvement. Regular reporting and meetings are now productive and engaging with real-time and accurate shared information, including the performance from all areas of your supply chain.
The Future of Fleet Analytics
In the future fleet analytics will provide even more meaningful information and insights. These will include
- Improved predictive analytics: This will enable you to ensure you have the correct capacity, manage maintenance schedules and select customers and routes to service.
- Artificial intelligence: In the future, AI will provide your team with the information required to consider a number of options simultaneously. AI will offer the ability to suggest areas of continuous improvement within your supply chain.
- Digital Twin Analysis: Having a digital twin of your organization allows your business to view the impact of your decisions without impacting your current operations.
It is exciting to consider the impact that predictive analytics and digital twin analysis will have on our supply chains in the very near future.
Fleet Analytics at M2X
Within M2X, we believe that having accurate and timely fleet analytics is crucial to understanding your supply chain and making informed decisions about the operation of your business. M2X provides detailed analytics from within its own captured data. This information is displayed on a customizable and interactive dashboard, allowing you to drill down into specific details in real-time to understand what is being shown. The information can be viewed by
- Customer
- Asset or Vehicle
- Location
- Product Type
M2X can also integrate with your telematics provider to serve a richer analytics platform that includes fleet, customer, and products in readily displayed graphics. While we believe that fleet analytics is a tool that should be used regularly, the team reviewing the analytics must understand how the data is pulled together and the operational processes used to obtain the data.
Contact us if would like to understand more about how M2X fleet analytics works and the benefits it can provide your team.
