Staying in contact with your drivers on the road is central to a smooth fleet management process. Discover how you can support your team effectively.
- Plan and adapt strategies in real time
- Stay in contact with drivers to relay key messaging
- Plot routes and amend where needed
- Enable safe and comfortable driving
- Use remote diagnostics
- Analyse performance through data and make reasoned, evidence-backed decisions
Once your vehicles have departed, there are a number of factors that can impact their performance, from breakdowns and traffic to fuel costs and maintenance requirements. Employing solutions that offer support on the road is the most effective way to ensure you are as proactive as possible and can manage your fleet in real time for the best results.
Remain on top of any and all challenges by supporting your trucks, trailers and drivers on the road to create a leaner, greener and safer fleet.
Spending time and resources on road support can be hugely beneficial to fleet performance.
Key reasons to focus on fleet road support
Spending time and resources on road support can be hugely beneficial to fleet performance. There are many benefits that can include:
Saving money
The dream for all fleet managers is to reduce costs while improving the overall performance of the fleet. Communicating with your drivers and accessing the data collected on your vehicles’ performance while they’re out and about can keep you informed of costly technical issues that could lead to breakdowns. This allows you to react and arrange maintenance in advance to reduce downtime. Road support can also save on fuel, allowing fleet managers to advise drivers on the most cost-efficient places and times to refuel, as well as the best driving routes to take.
Keep customers and the board happy
With a direct line of communication between vehicles, drivers and the fleet manager, you can minimise issues such as missed deliveries and pick-ups, delays due to traffic, breakdowns or weather conditions. This means you can keep your customers satisfied with your service, as well as your key internal stakeholders.
Improve efficiency
Using the right technology and solutions for road support enables you to access overviews, dashboards and data for analysis that’s absolutely priceless when it comes to fleet efficiency. You can optimise routes by seeing where delays are occurring, dig deep into data to find any frequent issues you may need to address and relay information back to the driver through text messages when necessary.
Once your vehicles have departed, there are a number of factors that can impact their performance, from breakdowns and traffic to fuel costs and maintenance requirements.
Ways to improve your support on the road
Modern fleet managers have several options to improve support on the road, all of which can significantly boost performance, safety and efficiency levels.
Connectivity
Digitisation in the transport and logistics industry has transformed connectivity by making data accessible anytime, anywhere, meaning you’re always in touch with your drivers and vehicles, no matter where they are. Fleets can now make use of telematics devices that combine with intelligent software solutions, handheld devices and WABCO products such as TX-SKY – which provides direct, two-way communication with drivers on the road.
Improved connectivity means, as a fleet manager, you can reroute trucks in real time and directly contact drivers for the most efficient refuelling stops to make.
Maintenance
Get ahead of the game when it comes to on-road issues with WABCO diagnostics software – alerting you to any issues with your trucks while they’re on the move. Connected software such as TX-DIAGNOSTIX will read out fault codes in an easy-to-understand way and explain how the problem can be solved.
For minor issues, trailer repair kits can help your driver take care of them before they become bigger and more expensive, resulting in reduced vehicle downtime. While with more serious problems, you can take the vehicle off the road and arrange repairs. This avoids unsafe vehicles being on the road and can get them back up and running quicker.
Safety
There are three factors you need to keep safe on the road – your drivers, vehicles and their cargo. A variety of advanced safety features help reduce the possibility of an accident, improving the driver experience and safety of your trucks and trailers. These include:
- SafeStart – Automatically brakes a trailer when it has a lifted tipper, open control panel or sensors detect the filling dome is not closed.
- TiltAlert – Alerts the driver when the tipper reaches a critical angle while tipping, to prevent a rollover.
- TailGUARD™ – Automatically brakes the trailer when reversing within 50 to 200cm from an object in the blind spot.
- Truck ADAS – OnGuardMAX™ provides autonomous emergency braking to prevent impending collisions, while OnLaneASSIST™ actively corrects the vehicle’s driving path when drifting into another lane unintendedly is detected.
- Emergency Brake Alert – Brake lights flash automatically when a truck is travelling at over 50km/h and decelerating faster than 4m/second.
The range of OptiLock™ products are vital for improving cargo safety. Conventional locks can reduce the chance of cargo and vehicle theft and will fit with the majority of trucks and trailers. WABCO’s electronic ELB-Lock® enables remote control via a telematics connection and withstands a sheer force of 4,000kg. Waterproof and robust, it’s designed for different climates so ideal for trucks and trailers travelling across different countries.
