According to Todd Ewing, director of product management for Fleetmatics, a Verizon Company, nothing beats the sound of the bat cracking and the smell of fresh hot dogs while sitting in your favorite stadium. Baseball—it has lasted through the industrial revolution, the world wars, and up to present day … and the reason goes beyond the food and fans. Deep within American’s favorite pastime lies the power of data. While successful baseball teams rely on speed and strength, success is also attributed to a team’s ability to accurately analyze data to inform clever strategies on the field.
Simply put, data analysis is instrumental in baseball and in any business. A data-focused approach involves a deeper dive into data collection and analysis and involves constantly looking for new insights and metrics to measure. For businesses with workers out in the field, this approach can be particularly beneficial. It doesn’t matter if a business has one or two people out in the field, or if it runs an entire fleet, mobile resource management can help an organization to create new ways to analyze performance, save costs, and improve productivity.
MONITOR PROGRESS
Through fleet management location-based technology, fleet managers and businesses can monitor their drivers and vehicles at any moment to help address frequent concerns including whether their drivers reached their destinations, or whether their customers are satisfied with the products or services. In addition, MRM has rendered timesheets moot. Managers are able to monitor their employees in real time, acquiring data that highlights solutions for better performance and higher customer satisfaction. With MRM, fleet managers can also be alerted to their driver’s status when in traffic, allowing them to warn the customer beforehand and defuse a potentially tense situation.
Further, MRM applications help business owners and fleet managers analyze the time each assignment requires and produce solutions for improvement. Managers are able to account for traffic and plan their drivers’ routes more effectively, schedule assignments to avoid peak traveling periods, better manage workloads, and even schedule more jobs in a day.
IMPROVE DRIVER BEHAVIOR
Driver speed, weight load, and idling time are all things a fleet management solution can monitor for and provide insight into. If a vehicle idles for 10 minutes per working day, averaged over a year, it can cost a business almost $80. Since managers can use the technology to address speeding or rate of acceleration, a mobile resource management platform also has significant implications for fuel consumption, efficiency, and safety.
The baseball season ended in early November, but as we reflect, we can turn to lessons about success from America’s favorite pastime. Using data and analytics can generate savings and improvements on a day-to-day level, which has a big impact year-over-year. Data analysis is not only sustaining America’s favorite pastime, but it is enabling fleet managers and businesses to gain a competitive edge and experience success.
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MODERN WORKTRUCK SOLUTIONS: DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE
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